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EDITIONS OF 
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SOLITARIUS TO HIS D/EMON. Three Papers. 

THE AMARANTH AND THE BERYL. An Elegy. 

A VENETIAN STUDY IN BLACK AND WHITE. A Drama-novel 

DIGBY : CHESS PROFESSOR. A Drama-novel. 

A DISILLUSIONED OCCULTIST. A Drama-novel. 

In Press : 
THE AMENITIES OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE. Three Papers. 
'SOLITARIUS IN CEYLON. 
VIA CAPRICCIOSA. 
THE MAITREYA : FIFTH OF BUDDHAS. 

1 2ffio. Bond parchment-paper binding, exquisitely 

printed on antique laid paper, with 

engraved title-pages, etc. 

FIFTY CENTS PER COPY. 



SOLITARIUS 
TO HIS 
D/EMON. 



►BARNS* 



WILLARD 
FRACKER 

COMPANY 



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SOLITARIUS to his DAEMON 

THREE PAPERS 

". , . . he ( Socrates ) declared himself to be constantly 
in the companionship and under the guidance of a good 
Damon , . . ," 

Xenophon's Memorabilia. 



TO 

A. EDDY WELLS 

THESE EFFORTS 
ARE WARMLY DEDICATED 



COPYRIGHT BY 
WILLARD FRACKER & COMPANY 



" And poets and philosophers 
Who read man's heart so well ; 

But what they knew and what they guessed 
Were wide as heaven from hell." .... 



SO LIT A RI US 



DAEMON 




THREE PAPERS 



CHARLES EDWARD BARNS 




Stew \)0xh 
WILLARD FRACKER & CO 



T5 10 1,2 



CONTENTS. 



THE EPHEMERIS OF NATURE ... 15 

SOLITUDE i 37 

THE POET'S PROVINCE .... 195 






The Ep hemeris of Nature 






There is a temple in each vested hour 
Wherein some sacrifice to Truth is made ; 
And, too, a dread Golgotha where is laid 

That hostage unto death which once was power 

And purpose, but long lost. There is a Tower 
Of Silence in each day where are conveyed 
The bones of the dead moments curst and flayed 

Of vultures— godless sextons that devour 
Their heritage of love — and, all is done ! 

Look up, young soul ! Canst thou not rescue one — 
One moment of thy youth immortally? — 

Snatch back thy lost days from oblivion 
And so fulfil thy God's expectancy? 
Up, Youth ! or 't is too late ; and thy sand-glass be run. 



The Ephemeris of Nature \$ 



FIRST PAPER 



©he IBphzmsxte of itatm?** 



Solitarlus comments r* * t\ 

on the modern Eth- CrOOd Daemon, Sit yOU 

ics of Disenchant- , t,.. r 

ment, and proceeds here. This is our feast- 

thence to affairs of a 1 ■, . ■, a 1 1 j * 

more genial nature, hour : let US be filled. A 

sorry symposiarch, you, with these sweet 
features awry, and the cup of grace — this 
genial oblation to the friend-proving gods 
— rattling timorously on the parted teeth 
as if 't were some martyr's hemlock you 
would to pledge me to heaven, rather 
than the peace-offering nectar we have 
brewed from the sweets of every zone, 
from the deeps of every sunken age, from 
the capping heights of every Utopian 
dream within our striving reach. Come ; 
is not the great, quivering heart of man 



Solitarius to his Damon 



large enough for a symposium of kings 
and patriarchs, though we be but poor 
craving beggars at the huge board, pray- 
ing and thankful for the merest crumbs 
that fall from the laps of poet, soldier, 
prophet, — all whose province is to think, 
whose duty is to act ? Why not indeed 
flatter existence into living — this hard- 
ened fact into a mellow rhapsody — this 
bodiless fiction into a living homily — this 
stern Buddhist's hell into a dreamer's 
heaven, if thereby we may find happiness 
for others and ourselves ? Let us at least 
be optimists — we poor 'churchyard game' 
— since this is the least tribute of grati- 
tude that mortal can offer up in homage 
to a beneficent Hand, — the most insub- 
stantial of cloaks to obscure our shrunk- 
en shapes from the eyes of a commiser- 
ating world that has quite enough of a 
task to keep its own volcanic heart from 
bursting the narrow confines, and setting 
free a volt of moulten pessimism that 
would immolate a race and sadden ten 
thousand eras of the recovering good 
and true. We have looked the great 



The Ephemeris of Nature 17 

globe over for that 'coming man ' which 
we will not be persuaded is yet come, — 
for that prophet who shall deliver Art 
from the Philistine yoke, and prove us 
profound in resource. Together, good 
Daemon, have we searched every zone, 
every clime, every crevice and fissure in 
the crags of our stony mortality where 
Truth would most likely hide her new 
interpreter, to cradle him into a thing of 
power and promise ; and yet, O patient 
Daemon, we have found him not. But 
what found we instead ? A whole world 
at warring sword-points. What here the 
worshipper kisses with penace-breathing 
lips, there the scoffer damns as irrelevant 
and trivial. Here one philosopher weeps, 
and there another laughs, over the iden- 
tical problem, — a struggling, estranging, 
moping Heraclitus, and a merry, careless 
and jesting Abderite, mingling in strang- 
est unison their prayers for the universal 
solvent of the Why of life, — for more 
light, more time, more means wherewith 
as a leverage upon Nature and the great 
heart of man, they may reason as reasons 



1 8 Soliiarius to his Dcetnon 

a god — with some assurance of success 
at the ultimatum. Here the devout man 
best expresses his reverence by uncover- 
ing the head ; to that one, equally rever- 
ent, such would be an act of profanation : 
he takes off his shoes : who dares say that 
they will ever meet upon a common relig- 
ious ground ? When the English drama 
wants a villain, it takes a Frenchman ; 
when the French drama requires a dupe, 
it takes an Englishman : who that des- 
pairs not of their ever becoming mutual 
each to each in any profound circle of 
thought, when the children of both are 
taught this antagonism from the cradle ? 
Here are tears : who shall say that they 
express not the extreme of joy as likely 
as some depth of sorrow ? Here is a 
divine history which our learned icono- 
clast proves profane ; since only truth is 
divine. Here a miracle proven a myth. 
Here our martyred philosopher proven a 
pompous Athenian vagabond ; our hero 
of a thousand years a brutal ignoramus ; 
our divine painter, a heartless rake ; the 
prophet of our reverence, an insinuating 



The Ephemeris of Nature 19 

knave ; the God incarnate, a mere man. 
Yet this is the progressive age, in which 
progression means the subversion of all 
that we reverence in the past, and for the 
future — more progress. Who deplores 
not the decline and fall of Respect ? 
When shall this madness to crowd three 
lives into one, give way to a new doctrine 
of digestion, maturation, and peptonic 
repose ? 

Yet, good Daemon, we know that what- 
ever is, is right ; even as we disbelieve 
our popular sophist's formula : that what- 
ever is, is not. Aye, Daemon, still the 
more thoughtful of us believe firmly that 
whatever is, is truth, is right, is justice, is 
God. This is the child's first privilege , 
the greybeard prophet's last assurance. 
Through all the interregnum spaces, — 
these restless intervals now optimist, now 
pessimist, overruling hatred, deifying 
adoration, realism, romanticism, faith, 
doubting, which come and go as adoles- 
cent diseases, — through all, though often 
filled with the most denying aud sombre 
of systems and opinions, the heart of 



Solitarius to his Damon 



man is true. So, Daemon, let us adhere 
with reverence to our watchword. How 
infinitely easier is it to contemplate the 
laws of nature with a respectful believing 
that they are right and just, until proven 
otherwise. But the task is to prove them 
otherwise. It is now quite the fashion to 
prove them otherwise ; and only an im- 
oderate deal of moping, a criminal deal 
of idleness, and a melancholy deal of hys- 
teria and desultory chatter, is as far as 
we have yet progressed. You remem- 
ber that long-tressed philosopher-barber 
in the Latin quarter in Paris, who, while 
administering to my beard in a most 
abandoned and merciless manner, grew 
so rashly confidential as to confess his 
passion — somewhat Shelleyan as we all 
know — for reforming the world ; but he 
still shaves whiskers at five sous a shave, 
and the old world as abominable a pit of 
plagues as ever. He is one of that army 
of sighing philosophers — a new and most 
promising sect, by the way — who cannot 
produce an idea, but can better yours ; 
who, like Archimedes, are certain they 
could move the world if thev had where- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 



on to stand, and yet do n't know how to 
hone a razor. We would, following out 
the dogmas of this statistical, atheistical 
age, enlighten by doubt, progress by sup- 
pression, reform by conforming. We 
have societies for the suppression of most 
everything nowadays : for the suppres- 
sion of vice ; of cruelties ; of saloons ; of 
religious superstition ; of the increase 
ratio of the human race over available 
resource ; of poverty ; of foreign inroads ; 
suppression of — God wot not what, good 
Daemon, while, too, all our creeds and 
systems are suppressive — suppressive of 
every other creed, of every other system. 
How vastly easier it is, O Daemon, to 
bear down than to bear up ; to reform 
by crushing rather that by enlightening 
and edifying ! But what will withstand 
the onslaught of a regiment of reformers 
with God and the grand law of gravita- 
tion on their side ? — not even the Chris- 
tian religion, it is argued. Two armies 
meet ; the watchword of the one is, ' God 
and Suppression!' — of the other, the 
shibboleth is, ' God and liberty ! ' Both 



Solitarius to his Daemon 



are right, for God is with both if with 
either ; it now descends into a question 
of material law. God and gravitation 
prevail ; God and he who would remedy 
by lifting the man above his pleasant 
vices that he himself disdain them, in- 
stead of crushing the vice, fall. Hence 
the suppressive era. 

And thus is it, O revered and indul- 
gent friend, that in this flood-tide of af- 
fairs worldly which we suffer not to ebb 
even if such be but in accordance with a 
most natural and vindictive law, there is 
but one man that really and truly lives, 
who gets the good out of life that proves 
existence something more than a pen- 
ance for some ancient sin : that one is 
the universal respecter, — the willing be- 
liever of that which unbelief only gives 
unhappiness. It is he who is brave 
enough to withstand the inroads of ques- 
tionable exotics in the clean, clear gar- 
dens of the thinking heart, refreshing the 
senses and lightening the souls of all that 
enter therein for edification and repose. 
I do not want the Bo-tree planted at my 
doorstep in place of my reverential oak 



The Ephemeris of Nature 23 

and flowering beech, even if it be the 
tree so sacred to Gautama. This oak and 
this beech are sacred to my hearth ; and 
that to me is worth ten thousand Buddhas. 
These oriental exotics will not flourish 
in our mental climate, and bear anything 
but sickly and unnatural fruit. As for 
our mental climate, why exchange that 
for a Hindu's, or an Icelander's, or an 
angel's even, if we flourish best in our 
own? It is crystallized into our marrows 
a thousand years back ; we demand it 
honored ; and so, must be the first to 
honor. We demand it respected : we 
must ourselves be the foremost of our 
respecters. 

Whosoever can vary the hymn of 
our commonplace days to a truer, godlier 
meaning, O Daemon, does he not fulfil 
the prophet's condition ? Whosoever can 
put a brighter, warmer, and more refined 
interpretation upon the sordid text of our 
monotonous ways, revealing in the work 
of our hands, the thoughts of our hearts, 
and in the passionate aspirations of our 



24 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

lives a possibility to a higher and pro- 
founder excellence, and who, taking up 
the sombre wrecks of our honest failures, 
demonstrates that even in the least of 
these there lies a bright embryo of future 
success which shall one day prove itself, 
— of that rare and most gifted optimist 
has not the world most precious need? 
In such an one the thinker approaches 
the god in quality. In him is vested a 
birthright greater than that of old. He 
is a king among churls ; a seer among 
sophists ; a man of God among scoffing 
knaves whose populous hearth is Legion. 
That man may speak when all the world 
is dumb ; may act when the greater than 
he is halt ; may do while others content 
them with the mere dream of doing ; 
may stand the brunt of presuming vice 
when the purple-robed and vested stand 
staring with a mere coward's passivity. 
To what noble and exalted use may not 
the gods have put such an one ? — to what 
of mortality is he not superior? Truth 
has yoked him with a star ; his orbit is 
of heaven. To such as he the great, 
broad-paged Ephemeris of Nature lies 



The Ephemeris of Nature 25 

broken of seal at his very hearthstone, — 
a majestic daily chronicle writ in the 
precious blood-drops of our heroisms, in 
the tears of our partings, in the censer- 
smokes of our religions, in the red flame 
of the pyres whereon the last vestiges of 
our faiths, sciences, arts and republics, 
are offered up in hostage to that absorb- 
ing deity of change and mutation. To 
him is it privileged to knowingly read 
and interpret to men the scriptures of 
that boundless open book writ in a lan- 
guage of the gods, — that which but the 
poet and the prophet interpret — written 
in the star-dusts of worlds made and 
worlds to be ; with the fire of suns and 
the lover's passion ; with ocean and for- 
est ; with things seen and unseen, mys- 
tery on mystery, miracle infinite, of which 
the heart of man is the throbbing centre, 
his ever-present God the boundless cir- 
cumference. It is written to the proof 
that with all subtile diversities of nature, 
time and removal each from each — the 
prophet of the Euphrates from the seer 
of Concord ; the poet of the Tiber from 



26 Solitarius to his Damon 

the bard of Rydal ; the Persian Firdusi 
from the era of Hiawatha ; the Arab as- 
tronomer from the epoch of the spectra- 
scope — we are of one element, world-over, 
century over : of one certain, inspired, 
reigning, God-elect principle. With all 
our warring and demanding creeds, O 
Daemon, with all our jealous arts and 
defying sciences, men, with mountains 
parting brothers — mountains of inherited 
hatred, disaffinity of dogma, season and 
environment — as they travel in the direc- 
tion whither all true thought proceeds, 
they are surprised to find that the dis- 
tance between them narrows, until at the 
last, friend and enemy, hater, lover, the 
truth-seeker, the truth-finder, the faith- 
taking and the faith-denying — even they 
who at the base of the mountain suffered 
that mountain to lie between them — now 
stand on the narrow apex at the summit, 
hand-clasped, co-thoughted, co-hearted — 
one. 

The daily record of this universal unit 
is Nature's Ephemeris. It has no past, 
it recognizes no future ; the all-vital and 
all-encompassing present is its only die- 



The Ephe7?ieris of Nature 27 

tator. To-day is its only clay. And even 
now, O marvelling Daemon, does it lie 
open wider on the outstretched palms of 
this shrunken, starving era than ever 
before, despite the world's indifference 
and the scholar's apathy, — the very same 
profound volume that lay outspread be- 
neath the sacred Bo-tree of Gautama's 
India, in the silent Confucian groves, in 
solemn vales of Engaddi, under the por- 
ticos of the Athenian temple of Wisdom, 
by the Nile's pale bed and the darkling 
Tiber's side, by the Russian prophet's 
couch and the still hearth of the night- 
bound Icelander,for everywhere the heart 
of man is faithful, there Truth is. 

A single line of the pure undiluted 
philosophy as it is here manifest, may it 
not be worthy, O Daemon, the noblest life- 
task of an intelletual giant? May it not 
absorb a whole art, a whole science, a 
whole system in its compassing grasp ? 
But alas for that searchful one who but 
contemplates this one line to the ex- 
clusion of all that lies beyond it. The mo- 



28 Solitarius to his Damon 

ment he sees nothing but this one line, — 
forgets indeed that it is but a hundredth 
of a page, a ten thousandth part of the 
whole volume — the moment he thinks 
truth revolves about one law and that law 
it has become his province to interpret 
to men, blind to the equal faith of others 
in their several capacities — he has yet to 
become enlightened and enlarged. A 
drop of water would be an ocean to 
some, whereon they might sail for ages, 
so small is the soul ; a universe is fit 
province for another, so magnanimous is 
the heart. Science his creed, Nature his 
formulary, — his observance, the God be- 
neath and beyond all, his religion : this 
is the trinity of Progression. Herschel 
sees all things by parallax and meridian ; 
to Harvey the great globe itself is but a 
drop of blood coursing through the veins 
of the infinite organism ; to Archimedes 
and Newton all things take centrifugal 
values and gravitating forces ; to Raph- 
ael and Michael Angelo all appears as if 
the beholder's eyes were prisms clothing 
the naked nature of our commonplace 
days with warm rainbows of radiance im- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 29 

perishable ; to Hippocrates and Galen 
the universe is all anatomy and analysis ; 
to Draper and Proctor, all spectra and 
parallel. Each feels that the vitalizing 
fluid of progress flows from his own 
heart through the universal frame, giving 
it life and quality, and back again to the 
well-spring whence it proceeded. To him 
whose life is embodied in one divine Idea, 
the world and its series becomes trans- 
parent through it ; and he contains it by 
being contained by it. Whatsoever oath 
the severely earnest man has sworn upon 
him, all nature takes its coloring, be it 
the oath of prophet, entomologist, pre- 
late or astronomer. Soul is the only true 
currency of the soul. Eternity will not 
be bribed off with half labor, half absorp- 
tion. Full faith, full purpose, full assim- 
ilation : this is a demand, not a mere alms- 
asking. Who dreams Nature a beggar ? 
She cries to the individual heart : I give 
thee one talent in thyself and ten talents 
in nature at thy ready command ; to what 
purpose shall it prove ? 






30 Solitarius to his Damon 

The material mind is the first datum 
of negation. It is the mapping of a warm 
God-given truth upon a heart of stone. 
It is the unlike springing from like, — 
the anomaly born of the normal and reg- 
ular in nature's processes. It is an equa- 
tion the solemn solution of which exacts 
research and concentration, leading but 
to disenchantment and pessimism, — her- 
ald of death and dissolution. What sus- 
tains not life, kills it : what refines not, 
coarsens ; what edifies not, crushes ; what 
believes not, cannot be believed. 

1 Life is a divine To be,' is the philoso- 
phy of youth ; 'life is a divine To day,' is 
the logic of the man. Has materiality 
now indeed reached its noon, and shall 
we indeed yet find automatons that shall 
bear out crosses, to do our labor, our 
thinking, our duties as men and our priv- 
ileges as poets, as prophets ? Must then 
the specific and individual give over to 
the fool's Catholicism, — this drag-net 
gathering of forces from shallow waters — 
and the man at last disappeared and sunk- 
en in men ? Is this then the great level- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 31 

ling age ? God forbid ! Has the age of 
heroes, — these lower gods lost in a multi- 
plicity of cowards — those major types of 
manhood who live so truly in and for 
their several arts, sciences and philoso- 
phies that it has become an austere re- 
ligious rite to perform their duties, and so 
dear to the heart that the man would lay 
down his life that his ]abor might live, — 
has the age of these then passed away 
and left us so precious to ourselves ? 

Mind and money are at unending, 
ignoble war ; and like all religious war, 
it is bitter and to purposes the deadliest. 
This is the capricious era of impulse and 
bill-posting. Superficiality is our meat 
and drink ; and this light diet of airy 
nothings makes an intellectual spindling 
of that republican virtue which could, by 
wholesome discipline, work most worthy 
wonders. We speed our mad chariots 
down the highways of this progressive 
era of materialism, reading the signs on 
the fences and flattering that into a lib- 
eral education. This is the era of medi- 



32 Solitarius to his Dcemon 



ocrity that follows the fleshy epoch of 
cold theosophies and of iconoclasm run 
mad; of sham and Schopenhauer, Bud- 
dhism and belittlement All dignifying 
presences of the sublime and the beauti- 
ful are calloused over by an age of the 
conventionally wise, the artificially in- 
spired. This divine afflatus of heaven 
which is the gift of sovereignty, is tinct 
and polluted by the muddy effluvium of 
cant. We demand books to think for 
us rather than to force our own thought ; 
music, art, religion that absolve us, work: 
ing our penance and praying for us rather 
than these same enduing our own spir- 
itualities, forcing that native fountain- 
source within us that we be ennobled 
from the heart outward. We read a 
page and think a line, rather than reading 
a line and thinking a page. All tends to 
popular depolarization, — to the centrifu- 
gal current of affairs; the individual an 
intrusion, the non-conforming the bar- 
barian. We stand upon the nether bor- 
ders of an intellectual plateau — a level- 
ling season of passivity — to the crushing 



The Ephemeris of Nature 2>Z 

of the more refining and spiritual by in- 
difference, drawing into this mad mael- 
strom the God-gifted one who must of 
exact necessity stand alone and apart to 
be inspired and capable. 

The western is a hemisphere of doubt. 
At every enlightening of the man and 
the race, our implicit legends, our awed 
supernaturalisms by which we prop our 
temples, our systems, creeds and philoso- 
phies, all must sweat the harder to main- 
tain. As the intellect advances in the 
vulgar mould, man turns iconoclast ; and 
well. The fault in the law, however, is 
in the abuse ; for in overturning heathen 
temples and sophist's sanctuaries he not 
unoften, quite unawares, overthrows the 
true with the false, the regenerate with 
the corrupt, the holy together with the 
profane. Charity we know not, — that 
charity which bears a profounder signif- 
icance than the mere unbinding of cof- 
fers that the indigent be fed. Charity 
must stand before men as a sacred his- 
tory of the soul,— an attribute of quality 
beyond the possibility of abuse. We will 



34 Solitarius to his Damon 

not trust the failure even when it looks 
upward toward success ; yet the man of 
no failures will prove the man of insignifi- 
cant achievement, as a rule, as the man of 
no weaknesses generally proves a man of 
few virtues. Who would see his interest- 
bearing principal raturned with usury to- 
morrow instead of a year from to-morrow 
we would call a fool and a vision-builder ; 
yet with a talent, what returns not imme- 
diate equivalent in compound proportion 
on the third day instead of the thirti- 
eth year, we discharge as worthless and 
trivial. This forcing of business laws 
upon our arts, our ethics, our religions, 
must take responsibility for the super- 
ficiality of the times. With us, law makes 
lawyers ; medicine, physicians ; music, 
composers ; but do they make men ? God 
help the man that is not greater than his 
creed. Machine thought, machine ethics, 
machine religion, is the spoliation of our 
native intuitions and refinements. That 
man is to be feared whose soul but de- 
scribes the circumference of a cog-wheel. 
A machine may move mountains in lieu of 



The Ephemeris of Nature 35 

a larger faith ; but when it begins to do 
our thinking for us, that which was esti- 
mable becomes a curse and a libel. A 
machine may lift an ocean from its slimy- 
bed ; but what machine can lift the aban- 
doned, sensual man out of his forgetful 
self into a grander, nobler personality? 
Steam, petroleum, electricity, — these are 
noble serfs ; they are hard masters. They 
may build our temples ; but they must 
not build our religions. They may fur- 
ther our arts ; but they must not inspire 
nor subvert them. Looms may serve our 
material ends ; but they must not weave 
our intellectual fabrics, nor write our 
books. These are all toys to the climax 
of a great mind. These but babble when 
a great soul speaks. 

Animals and machines demand soci- 
ety ; the nearer we aproach these in our 
social retrogressions, the greater our ha- 
tred of solitude. Alone the man is a unit; 
in society, but one of many, — an arc 
merely of the soul's proper circumference 
made manifest, even though dissembled 



36 Solitarius to his Dazmon 

by courtesy and obscured by cant. In 
our downward flight to the crowd we 
leave our nobler adjuncts, — our superior 
portions which will ever stand aloof 
in spite of us — in the clouds, in the forest, 
in the closet. 'What !' said an astronomer 
to me; 'think you that I star-gaze the 
whole night ? Why, I can take observa- 
tions in ten minutes that may require ten 
days of after-labor and meditation.' The 
soul's theory, this. The cities of stars to 
the astronomer : the cities of men to the 
thinker. 

But neither Thales, nor Pythagoras, 
nor Phocion knew machine powers as 
we ; yet each lived to do for mankind 
and the up-waging generation to this day 
what the best of us with all our engine- 
ries of material presumption cannot hope. 
Machines are noble auxiliaries ; but the 
thinker and the man despise them when 
as mere machines they presume beyond 
their province. Strange indeed is the 
paradox that the more machines we have 
the less thinking we do. To-day our 



The Ephemeris of Nature 37 

hands are horny and callous with toil ; 
to-morrow a machine does our labor and 
we sit in idleness. So much more time 
to improve the mind, we doubtless argue ; 
but it is the merest sophism. With the 
softening of the laborer's hands comes 
the softening of his brains. Toil begets 
toil : the manual the intellectual ; and 
idleness begets idleness ; crime, crime, 
perdition and death. 

We are essentially a nation of whims. 
A conventional manner-worship, — an ap- 
proved fetichism, an inherent respect for 
person and place — becomes our social 
scripture. No philosophy can touch a 
whim. Impulse disdains law or logic. 
We must have the broad world's intel- 
lectual treasures translated into the prim- 
er language of society-children and doled 
out at our door-step like the fish-monger's 
wares and the pedler's. One may argue 
his case wholesomely, but the creature of 
use comes back inevitably : 'You think 
so ; but make me think so, if you can.' 
All the philosophies cannot beard one 



38 Solitarins to his Damon 

stubborn humor. Worship or the hatred 
that was once worship, transcends disdain- 
fully the weightiest reason. 'Conform !' 
is the sensual cry; 'Perform!' is the 
spiritual. Men have thought profoundly 
before us and put their fine utterances 
into our mouths : why think ? This is 
the sophist's scripture. Why is not ' Men 
have eaten before us : why eat ? — as laud- 
able logic? Intellectual cravings must 
be satisfied, and from within, with fresh 
and seasonable truth. Blest indeed is he 
then that has brought his whole spirit to 
a focus upon one line of Nature's vast 
Ephemeris ; and whether he has learned 
it by the warm noontide of prosperity, by 
the twilight of hard circumstance, or by 
the midnight lamp of privation and pain, 
has learned it faithfully. Let him be a 
man first and a doer afterward. Let him 
live, act and be manhood before he pre- 
sumes to called philosopher, poet, painter, 
or sage. When the season befits the ge- 
nius, the manhood will out. Like truth, it 
cannot be withheld when it has found its 
medium — its interpreter, even by the very 



The Ephemeris of Nature 39 

breast that shelters and nurtures it, any- 
more than a meteor burst from the bosom 
of the sun. Despite wars, cupidities or 
the retrogression of races, the poet in the 
man, the thinker in the man, the God in 
the man, will out and so maintain. 

Agassiz could name the genus of a fish 
from a single scale or fin. How a single 
word on the lips of Napoleon, a single 
thought from the heart of Plato, a single 
line from Hamlet or Hyperion, stands as 
an arc showing the curve of a vast cir- 
cumference ! It is as a single window 
making visible and clear the depth of a 
beautiful soul. We do not require the 
whole deed to point the poet's triumph, 
any more than we demand the history 
of a war to know the secret of the deci- 
sive battle, or to measure from star to 
star with a foot-rule in order to determine 
with accuracy their magnitudes and in- 
tervals. The crowning gun of the battle, 
the polar-sentiment of the book, the cen- 
tral law of the system, the fulcrum-point 
of the political or social leverage, the 
resonant pitch of the symphony, the high 



40 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

lights of the picture, and the grand cli- 
materic of human life, announces the 
laurel, and proclaims the Master and 
his vantage. 

The thinker is the dual, quadruple, in- 
finite factor of the universal series, mul- 
tiplying himself into every known quan- 
tity, — every fact throughout his province, 
and the result interpreting to men. Gen- 
ius multiplied into a fact gives a law, a 
theorem, or a truth. The dead stone be- 
comes a living sermon ; the running 
brook, a sacred scripture ; the merest 
commonplace, a divine comedy. Now is 
he a Delphian, with his religion Night 
and Water. Now is he Ionian, with his 
refined and radiant altars set upon the 
intangible /Ether and Erebus. And now 
has he become in turn, a sombre Thalian ; 
a demanding Pythagorean ; a luxurious 
Anaximanian, with his ' very earth float- 
ing like a broad leaf upon the ocean of 
the eternal ; but still, beyond all and su- 
perior to all, he is the thinker and the 
man. Greater than Platonian, Epicurian, 
Megarian, or Stoic, he is himself. Light, 
light ! — this is the inspired alpha and the 



The Ephemeris of Nature 41 

resigned omega of the thinker's synthesis 
Nothing greets his penetrating eyes but 
bears a spiritual shadow ; nothing so base 
and corruption-bred but bears somewhat 
of a superior credential which is a pass- 
port into a company of divine things, be 
they living thoughts, living actions, or 
living men. Every truth looks up. 

The thinker then is not the creator ; 
he is merely the preserver of things sa- 
cred to truth, to thought, to ascendency, — 
merely the mediating quality, O Daemon, 
between the finite entrusted through him 
with most sovereign truths from an infin- 
ite source, even as thou betwixt the gods 
and this humble couch whereon I so 
appealingly discourse to you. The think- 
er is the revealing Vishnu, — that preserv- 
ing co-eternity with Brahma, the creator ; 
he is merely the second of the series, the 
medial factor of the divine trilogy — the 
treasurer and withholding conservatist. 
The broad Ephemeris of Nature with its 
daily chronicle of progressions and ret- 
rogressions, of revolutions for the over- 
throw of tyranny, and revolutions that 



4? Solitarius to his Damon 

but hurl impediment in the path of social 
progress, — all making themselves a scrip- 
ture for the thinker's reading, a temple 
for the thinker's worship. Nature is re- 
fracted momently into ten thousand hues 
by this prism of the thinker's mind. He 
is at best but a God-gifted prism-holder 
before Nature for the betterment of men 
and his art therein edified, — a recorder 
and a centurian at a high and exalted 
post of honor. 

Are not, then, O Daemon, the lower 
airs of heaven and the upper airs of earth 
identical? — is not the superior mortal and 
the immortal, one ? Is it indeed such an 
illimitable chasm that parts the superior 
manhood and the lesser godhood ? May 
not the refined spirit by a devout enthu- 
siasm and soberest consecration to the 
exalted art of his choice, live so firmly 
united with the divinity of little things 
that the man himself becomes divine ? 
As we proceed onward, upward through 
the refined ether of an exalted purpose, 
O Daemon, does not the chasm of death 
appear narrower and still narrower, till to 
the man standing at the vital verge, it 



The Ephemeris of Nature 43 

shrinks to the breadth of a hair, becom- 
ing imperceptible to the soul as it pro- 
ceeds from element to element, blending 
like a transformed ray of divine light 
into those border-realms without a jar? 
Labor, concentration, solitude, emancipa- 
tion from the profane, the trivial and the 
unpurposed, and at the climax of the as- 
cendant soul, death a nothingness and a 
name : is not this then the province of 
the thinker and the man ? 

The paramount glory of Buddha is 
that he lived Buddhism ; of Muhommet, 
that he lived Islamism ; of Plato, Platon- 
ism. Each outlived and deified his doc- 
trine by being greater than his creed, — 
by being ever superior to and transcend- 
ing his best moments by the presence of 
a living, inspired and inspiring personal- 
ity. But Buddhism at our doorstep is at 
best a colossal skeleton clothed in a mag- 
nificent raiment of most sombre and an- 
cient cut and most rigorous formality. 
To flay this grotesque and gorgeous phan- 
tom and reclothe it with the glaring and 



44 Solitarius to his Damon 

vulgar habiliments of modern interpreta- 
tion, is infamy ; thrice dishonoring the 
dead but unsepulcred teacher by record- 
ing in a magnifying light his gravest 
atrocities with a presumption he himself 
would have blushed to behold in so mis- 
construing a light. The written tenets 
of any prophet will not stand the brazen 
glare of detail upon their vulnerable 
parts. Even Nature in her most perfect 
mood is not ever flawless. It seems to 
be the will of the all-reasonable Mind 
that to merely symbolize this truth, sink 
that beneath some rugged exterior, leav- 
ing but a meagre hint to point a third 
grand certitude of faith, still left to the 
reasoner all he needed to assure him of 
his high and certain possibility. Surely 
if only the God's truth would remain up- 
on the page while all else melted away 
into its fit oblivion, how would our libra- 
ries become shrunken, the pages nar- 
rowed, the lines shortened, and indeed 
how simple would grow our language — 
how few and well-chosen our words ! 

Nature is ever undergoing a process of 
crystallization, — a passing from the gas- 



The Bphemeris of Nature 45 

eous to the liquid and from the liquid to 
the solid state. A common interest man 
to man at last bridges the span betwixt 
peoples and countries, assimilating lan- 
guage, manners, laws, religions, — truth 
undergoing the solidifying process from 
epoch to epoch. Facts that are native 
with the true have diffusive powers that 
can but multiply themselves over repub- 
lic and kingdom, over era and season 
when the conditions are matured. A new 
temple to the omniscient rises with every 
new departure in art or science stamp- 
ing a people's individuality upon all 
that follows in its wide wake, — a new 
sanctuary of which the man is priest and 
prelate. With truth at the right hand, no 
longer is anything incomplete or impos- 
sible with the hero. An epoch in science 
is announced here, another in art there, 
and still a third in music beyond ; and 
the eras grow shorter with the times, till 
the very heart of things seems not so very 
far off when we can so distinctly feel the 
pulse of nature through every member 
of the universal frame. The mediocre of 



46 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

to-day would have been something praise- 
worthy even a century ago. The wake 
the most lauded genius of the times may 
leave plowed in the current of affairs, at 
best but survives the generation fol- 
lowing. We grow in the nature of that 
we feed on ; like producing like from 
most unlike material. Small Kantians, 
small Johnsons, small Boccaccios, rise up 
in the wake of their several masters, and 
proclaim themselves ; and though the in- 
fluence of the teacher stands brazenly ev- 
ident, if the man stands superior to his 
art, he soon casts aside the assumed garb, 
and the imitator becomes creator. This 
marks the thinker : to utilize all material 
within his wide reach, think everybody's 
thoughts and respect all earnest opinions 
— the saint's and the knave's ; for though 
all thoughts are old thoughts, with its ad- 
vent at the heard of a new man, it be- 
comes a new thought. Need we be told 
that what we utter in our most efficient 
moods is but an echo of the Chian The- 
ocritus, the Theban Pindar, the Boeotian 
Plutarch, or the Arab Avicenna? Within 
every true sentiment there is a spark of 



The Ephemeris of Nature 47 

humanity, and humanity is a common 
factor ; it is one with all, one with God, 
and cannot be hoarded nor plagiarized. 
The refined arts and sciences have 
each chosen a star ; and only he that 
has a star for a pulpit, for a workshop, for 
a studio or a groove — who pedestals his 
great broad soul on a planet ere he dare 
speak and be heard — only he can dis- 
course the wisdom that maintains. If he 
cannot do this, he must remain a mere 
detailist — an absorber ; he cannot be a 
soul among souls : he must remain a mere 
atom among atom-kind. 

Humanism of the head sinks ; it is 
dead letter to the living spirit. Dream 
not the beatitudes : live them. You seek 
the world over for a religion, and every 
man shakes his head ; yet Truth goes not 
so far to discover it for you. Truth finds 
your religion in your own heart ; and 
greater religion is it than was ever penned 
or preached. Was the Garden of Eden 
in Ceylon as the Buddhist prophet ar- 
gues, or in the land of the Chaldean ? — 



48 Solitarius to his D&mon 

what cares the devout thinker ? Has he 
not a very Eden in his own living heart, 
the grandeur and boundaries of which he 
has never explored, nor can through all 
eternity ? What cares he for the written 
scripture when the unwritten speaks ? — 
for the dead letter when the living spirit 
outreaches the most eloquent word with 
a revealing silence, the most awed relic 
with a more exalting conviction ? What 
cares he for holy sepulchres and vaunting 
relics, w T hose soul is a priceless jewel he 
well respects and honors ? What cares 
the larger faith whether the miracles are 
or are not fictions ? — whether the elder 
prophets were men of God, or mere gifted 
conjurers ? — whether Sodom fell, or Solo- 
mon ruled ? Verily, O Daemon, to him 
who bears the living Christ on a heroes 
heart, prate not of the dead one. A sorry 
soul is that which for its exalted trust 
depends upon arcs, altar-shrines, formu- 
laries and upon the barbarities of ancient 
ritual, — whether Adam was or was not, 
whether physical laws combined to per- 
form the attributed wonders of the past, 



The Ephemeris of Nature 49 

or whether the result of supernatural in- 
tervention ? A great soul respects all, 
honors all , but finds a living religion in 
a living heart rather than in a dead and 
dust-encumbered fact which appeals but 
to the crouching and servile, rather than 
the erect and godlike, man. Our relig- 
ions, following the compelling channels 
of these enlarging times, become cos- 
mopolized ; become republicanized ; be- 
liberated of all over-weighing auxiliaries 
that awe, but inspire not ; exact, but con- 
form not ; crush, but repair not. 

Man is a walking introspection. All 
thought-compelling experiances bear to 
all other of the same series such indis- 
putable analogy, that the Greek values 
in a given truth find their way from the 
unconscious heart of a Saracen, and then 
become metamorphosed into a. thing 
that claims righteous lineage from the 
four quarters of the globe. When we are 
very young, O Daemon, with what rich 
and refined enthusiasms do our intuitions 
vaunt themselves! With what original 



5° 



Solitarius to his Damon 



verve and flower do our entrancing, ap- 
plauding dreams crystallize themselves ! 
Yet by keeping his nose to the classics 
for a little season, the scholar is amazed 
to find his most exclusive thought now 
masquerading before the profane world 
in a Roman toga ; a little further back, 
regaled with a set of Mahometan whis- 
kers ; still further, twanging a Lydian 
harp, or swinging a Spartan battle-axe ; 
and now it has said its prayers to Baal in 
the valley of the Kedron ; now chewing 
betel-nut under the Bo-tree of Buddha ; 
and still again, girded most tropically in 
a Singhalese camboy ; or perhaps accom- 
panying with pathetic quiver the Japan- 
ese samosen at the base of the then fire- 
breathing Fuji. Verily, O Daemon, a 
sentiment is a spark of humanity ; and 
humanity is sacred not to one, but to all, 
nations and eras. A thought is a frag- 
men of the Rock of Ages ; come to light 
where it will, not to the inspired mouth 
that speaks it, but to the Rock whence 
the wild waters of eternity have struck it, 
does the heart of man compel his prayerful 
eyes to turn in gratitude, and his man- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 51 

hood to swear upon him a nobler purpose, 
a purer charity and a surer faith, to the 
betterment of men and the dignifying of 
their labors. What we dreamt brought 
forth from the deeps of an individual heart 
upon this passionate and fevering mo- 
ment, even so dreamt the priest of Isis 
gazing with rapturous eyes upon the ris- 
ing Nile ; and the Mesopotamian hermit, 
in his Northern groves — each, even as 
we, thinking himself the first interpreter 
of a wise and radiant thought. We have 
during our youthful seeking after the 
truths and capacities that lie dormant in 
our own hearts, to creep through a most 
formidable mauvais pas of self-scepticism 
— an interregnum period when the scholar 
half fears to make use of the ripe and 
moulten thought or the apt and dignify- 
ing expression that brims up sparkling to 
the applauding lip, lest he be branded a 
pilferer. Then follows that gloriously 
regardless autumn season of maturity and 
indulgence when the man realizes him- 
self greater than his own or any man's 
thoughts ; what he has put himself in, 



52 Solitarius to his Damon 

that is no longer any man's : it is he. 
Then has come that time when oppor- 
tunities are realized and honored ; when 
the scholar pursues conquest over all 
beaten and unbeaten tracks, sponge-like 
absorbing, assimilating, digesting, and 
growing ever greater in charity and pro- 
founder in thought in these refining in- 
fluences, all the while thanking the pre- 
siding deities that he had a Frenchman 
to steal from ; that Frenchman, an Arab ; 
that Arab, a Jew ; that Jew, a Hindu ; 
the Hindu, a Chinaman, — each no more 
culpable in his assimilation and uncon- 
scious repetition of the ideas of those 
before him, than in the unconscious rep- 
etition of himself. We discover a new 
phase of nature, and immediately brand 
it with a name. In our flattering tri- 
umphs the sign-painter's imprint obscures 
the - name of Nature, and the thought 
goes begging while its presuming dis- 
coverer rides his chariot. O Daemon, 
with what perspiring assiduity are the 
Ethics of Plagiarism studied by many 
a divine young exclusionist from whom 
a snail would not steal his pace. 



The Ephemeris of Nature 53 

We look into the faces of men : are 
they after all the windows of the soul? 
Do the green, composure-speaking fields 
and the luxuriating forests make more 
manifest, or rather conceal, the hell at 
the heart of material nature ? That face 
wears the glad guise of Morning, making 
radiant the eyes of all beholders: what 
know we of the midnight of sorrow and 
shattered faith that condemns the heart 
to throb out this bitter inch-long span of 
eternity in confounding darkness ? That 
face all sparkling comedy, who dreams 
but cloaks down a hundred tragedies en- 
acted in the secret recesses of a human 
heart where rant the regrets of a criminal 
error, the remorse of some misdirected, 
fallen ambition, or the shame of a cruel 
and undevout love, sporting like taunt- 
ing fiends with the holiest moments of 
the regenerate soul ? This feature wears 
a triumph of heaven in its warm, com- 
placent look ; yet what know we of the 
hell smothered down in the deeps of the 
bosom that must feed, yet bely it ? Surely, 
O Daemon, the human countenance, like 



54 Solitarius to his Dczmon 

language, is vouchsafed us to conceal, 
rather than to reveal, the heart. 

We shadow forth our faith or our 
doubt by a single idea, or we conceal it 
by another. We reveal a whole catalogue 
of virtues by a single act, or we conceal 
the only one we may possess by another. 
We deem this one placid, amiable, stupid 
even, it may be ; but suddenly some fired 
indignation, some high, noble and God- 
revealing purpose, some holy believing 
or profound passion, stirs the feature with 
an inspired mood, and forthwith those 
bloodless lips become purple oracles that 
speak with the voice of a prophet, those 
eyes grow prophetic, the brow austere 
and commanding. A moment gone we 
esteemed him not ; now we behold a 
roused and ready Titan that had slept all 
this time castled up in a brave man's 
heart, and so give honor. 

All things on the earth's surface may 
be said to be equi-distant from the sun ; 
so every condition of human frailty, suf- 
ferance, supremacy and power is virtually 
equi-distant from the heaven. If we 
recognize many above us, and at the 



The Ephemeris of Nature 55 

same time flatter ourselves above many 
in the scale of man's authority and of 
worldly importance, we have but to con- 
sider the boasts and triumphs of the 
whole human race as they might appear 
to the beholding sun, and how infinitesi- 
mal becomes the circumference of an 
empire, a republic, a state, say nothing of 
the presuming boast of one purse, one 
intellect, one leverage upon the thoughts, 
principles and conditions of men ! Ah, 
good Daemon, the great man's pompous 
deed for the plaudits of the world, and 
the child's little act of spontaneous nobil- 
ity to the joying of one weary, grateful 
heart — these travel Godward side by side. 
The greater may despise the lesser on 
their journey thither; but anon the pur- 
ple and scarlet of the one grow heavy 
and are cast aside, the meagre rags of the 
of the other become transcendently white 
and beautiful, and at last the great and 
small pass the threshold of heaven hand- 
clasped, co-equal — one. O Daemon ! who 
shall presume precedence in this exalted 
tribute-bearing before Truth ! Who by 



56 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

any vantage of condition — mental, mate- 
rial, temporal — shall presume in the face 
of a duty done ? The tribute proves the 
spirit ; the God whom it glorifies is no 
respecter of the circumstance, the person, 
or the condition that bears it. ' Do thou 
thy duty, and thou shalt in nowise be 
forgotten.' This is the assurance of the 
hero. 

The past is ever beholden to the 
man in the guise of a canonized saint. 
Like the shade of Socrates, it walks the 
earth scourged with the half-just reputa- 
tion of an ubiquitous visionist and a pre- 
suming bore that has had the good for- 
tune to be martyred at the climax of its 
useful reforms. If we poets, theorists, 
reformers could only be privileged to die 
for the cause we espouse, — just at the 
happiest pass of our divided popularity, 
at the apex of our crescendo enthusiasm, 
at the maturest point of vantage that 
skirts the border brink of decline, fall 
martyr to the virtue we defend ! Do we 
not lose half our chances of deification 
by living in an enlightened age ? Civil- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 57 

ization marks the rise of the politician 
and the fall of the saint. Time was when 
if the one must have immortality at any 
cost, and could not write a good epic, the 
next best thing was to write a bad one 
and get killed for it. But the times have 
changed, O Daemon ; the poet walks 
abroad without shield or helmet, excit- 
ing no envy, inspiring no worship. Man 
is what man demands ; not pretence. La- 
bor ; not martyrdom. The nobility of the 
deed done ; not the servility to a promise 
which the coward was not man enough 
to fulfil, so plunges into peril and dies to 
save him from the curse of mediocrity. 
But past still in the popular eye enjoys 
that exalted privilege of the saint and 
sage of old — that of being burned at the 
stake and apotheosized with distinction 
certainly commensurate with its due. A 
fact becomes a gospel ; a fiction a sacred, 
God-witnessed truth. To-day's trifles 
prove gods to the future ; even as these 
gods in the memory were perhaps mere 
trifles in the eye of the past. We cherish 
memories with a fidelity little short of 



58 Solitarius to his Daemon 

veneration. Anything disentangled from 
the poison ivy of the present sensual cir- 
cumstance, immediately assumes divine 
proportions, and so becomes a power be- 
neath power — a growing certitude with 
the years. 

The Ephemerides of Nature as they 
are written upon the broad hearts of ma- 
terial things, are an index to light when 
approached by the believing man ; an in- 
dex to darkness when approached by the 
sensual man. In her scriptures, man is a 
great truth ; but truth is the greater man; 
that is, the man fulfilling a law by stand- 
ing paramount to it. Obscure great- 
ness of spirit, like latent truth, cannot be 
long hidden when the tongue worthy to 
give it comprehending utterance has 
risen. Obscured and smothered Shakes- 
peares and Dantes and Correggios are not 
to be found in Missouri and Kamtchatka 
as might primitively have been supposed. 
The essential oils of heaven are too pre- 
cious indeed to be poured out upon the 
flat arras and left to enrich nothing but 
a handful of dry dust that renders no 
thanks, instead of filling to the brim the 



The Ephemeris of Nature 59 

altar-lamp of some high sanctuary of the 
beautiful and true, dispelling darkness 
and lighting up the holy face of Nature 
that the beholding world can but believe. 
The great golden Ephemeris is always 
open by day and by night — the blood- 
writ chronicles of God, the illuminated 
log-book of Progress with its text of 
gold purer and purer as the times pro- 
ceed. There it lies with hugest arms out- 
stretched and silent eloquence surpassing 
beautiful, willing, entreating, beseeching 
the simple and confiding heart to read, 
ponder and be made glad. 

Nature is ever and forever yours. In- 
to the forest direct your studious steps, 
be a poet and a man, and she is yours. 
In the laboratory by midnight seek her, 
and she is yours again in another attitude 
and feature, priestess at a new altar-place 
to her God, and the one of yesterday is 
already obsolete. Nature says, Learn 
thou an art ; when men have taught thee 
all they can impart, come then to me. 
Learn thou a science ; and when the 
ways and means of commonplace fact 



60 Solitarius to his Damon 

have blest thee material wisdom, come 
thou to me and learn that which tran- 
scends it. But if thou canst not learn 
thy particular duty well — canst not rise 
superior to mere circumstance and condi- 
tion, thou canst not behold me in my 
true presence. I shall remain forever a 
mere titular under-value which stands for 
a block of ore, a grain of wheat, a mote 
of dust ; but Nature to you as beholden 
to the prophet, I can never be. To seek 
me and find me as I am, thou shouldst be 
a man, in spirit huge as the Colossus of 
Rhodes at the port of Truth, with the 
material arts and sciences of little men 
and little circumstance passing out into ' 
the broad world beneath thee. 

The thinker burns all bridges be- 
hind him in his ascent from star to star, 
from truth to truth ; and those following 
wonder if there ever could have been a 
bridge at all. He was the first freedman ; 
and being free, was the only prophet 
whose nobility could rise and free others, 
whose republican right arm could estab- 



The Mphemeris of JStature 61 

lish a republic in its own birthright. A 
thinker was the first Buddha, — the first 
interpreter of the 'Wheel of the Law,' the 
universe his temple, its God his God, the 
praying peaks and crouching plains his 
altar-place, pulpit and laboratory. The 
sun by noon, the stars by night give him 
fit alb and vestments, self-reliance his 
tiera of state, the clouds his incense, and 
a giant Thought at the heart working re- 
generation and accruing magnanimity 
and power, proving him fit for the super- 
most regency and voice. The thinker is 
a temple to the charities, where the blind 
and palsied of spirit may receive the 
complement of their incomplete natures, 
and where those whose lives are frag- 
ments may be made whole. His is that 
elect condition of the heart which con- 
strues all for the best. As there can be 
no light that contains not an element of 
darkness — since there is no light but may 
be outshone by a brighter ray — so to the 
mortal vision there can be no embodying 
purity without a trace of sensual taint. 
But, O Daemon, is it after all the power 



62 Solitartus to his D anion 

of discerning and magnifying to eyes of 
others the Devil's finger-marks on the 
forehead of things holy that proves the 
presence of greatness ? Is it not rather 
the manly ignoring and the generous for- 
getting of them ? — the standing so supe- 
rior to, and removed from, the carnalities 
of the times, the taint is forgotten in the 
glory of the man ? Has not this last 
phrase become almost a self-quotation 
with me ? May not one with genial pro- 
priety while in one of his lesser moods 
quote the spontaneities of one of his bet- 
ter—one of his super-moods, as it were ? 
You remember our noble-natured Winah, 
who, for some inherited curse of his fam- 
ily, was condemned to wear a mark of 
shame on his forehead — a sort of Scarlet 
Letter which proclaimed him unclean to 
his uncommiserating world ? How did 
the horrified natives augur disaster and 
defeat in my face when I chose the des- 
pised but grateful Winah to pilot our 
elephants through the wild jungles of 
Ceylon ; and yet how faithful proved he 
to our every trust ! And remember, too, 



The Ephemeris of Nature 63 

how at the base of Mihintali he rescued 
a little child from the mouth of a cheetah, 
but even that act of transcendent heroism 
washed not away the ugly scarlet stroke 
of the priest of the Destinies, — aye, even 
struck it deeper and more galling, since 
the child thus rescued from the gods was 
henceforth a thing unclean even in the 
eyes of its bewailing mother] But I re- 
warded him — bear witness, O Daemon, 
how reverently ! — not alone with gold 
and patronage, but with my love and re- 
spect for the solemn lesson so rudely but 
indelibly imparted, and even this hour, if 
my faithful servant lives, does he bear 
clinging about his swarthy neck like a 
ministration of good cheer in his outcast 
world, the little leathern case containing 
a piece of yellow parchment made of the 
glossy skin of a cobra's belly, whereon I 
wrote in the blood of that tiger he had 
slain with a single blow of a javalin, the 
words, which, though he never read, he 
certainly comprehended by the merest 
devotional instinct : — 



64 Solitarius to his Damon 

I saw a tiny spot 

On the forehead of the sun; 
It was like the curse of Cain 

On the forehead of the sun; 
But the taint was soon forgot 

In the glory of the sun. 

I saw a tiny spot 

On the forehead of a man; 
It was like the curse of Cain 

On the forehead of the man ; 
But the taint was soon forgot 

In the glory of the man. 

Why persist we, O Daemon, in taking 
upon ourselves the sombre guise and 
habit of pessimism so unworthy the man 
and times, when the warmer, thrice more 
dignified and refined vestment of God- 
speed and good cheer — the 'hope on, 
hope ever' philosophy of the hero's 
heart and purpose — becomes so nobly 
the least of mortal circumstance ? We 
stand in relation to this resurrected and 
rehabilitated Buddhism as Pencecola the 
swimmer whose achievements have long 
since passed into classics, bears to the 
bottomless pool of Charybdis. He dove to 
its depths once, and quite satisfied of its 
horrors, could not be persuaded to repeat 



The Ephemeris of Nature 65 

the perilous feat until the king tossed 
a golden cup into the black pool to 
tempt him : the swimmer dove, but was 
never seen again. Let but some mock 
prophet toss a glittering prize into the 
stagnant pools of pessimism, and with 
what eagerness a whole generation of 
young presumers leap in after it ! Bud- 
dhism has ruined many a good Buddhist, 
as theology, many a good Christian. It is 
so easy to be a good Christian, so difficult 
to be a good man. As for all the sol- 
vents of the problems of death and its 
kindred mysteries, no man was ever so 
enamoured of them but that sooner or 
later his inordinate passion was to the 
vital utmost realized. Yet, who can 
say that we solve that wonder-problem 
of death by dying, any more that we can 
solve the mysteries of life by living. But, 
O Daemon, I do not believe in the gloat- 
ing of thoughts that prematurely whiten 
the hairs and rib the brows of youth with 
furrows that speak abandonment and en- 
nui through the most cultured gallantries 



66 Solitarius to his .D anion 

where the heart is not. Pessimism spiced 
and be-sauced to the nicest demand of 
the modern palate is a most delicious 
plaything ; but meat, drink and vitality 
to the starving soul, it is not. A dead 
lion in the lap of the great, wide-hearted 
To-day is at best an encumbrance when 
it has ceased to be a mere object-lesson 
for our genial superficialities. Any hon- 
est man's creed is worthy a honest man's 
respect just so far as he lives within it. 
When he prates of one while living up to 
another, he is a mere presumer, and has 
not the generous soul's respect for the 
greater soul that espouses courageously 
a noble but unpopular cause in the sol- 
emn and soldierly fulfilment of a duty. 
Metaphysics may analyze a religion ; but, 
O Daemon, it cannot found one in the 
arras of a dead clime, or in the heart of 
of the savage or the scoffer. Pessimisn 
may tear down a wise man's faith ; but it 
cannot upbuild a temple of content in 
the heart of a fool. Faith will probe a 
wound, snatching out the core of a cank- 
erous grief ; but pessimism would cover 



The Ephemeris of Nature 67 

it over with dead herbs and concealing 
bandages, and let the smouldering fires 
of hell burn on an eternal curse upon the 
soul. Addison persists that facts are 
plain spoken ; tropes and figures their 
aversion. But are not the surest of facts 
but tropes and figures made manifest ? 
Was not Nature idea before an actuality. 
Facts may speak for themselves ; but it 
is a lying fact that withholds the name 
of its mother. Every fact must bear two 
dial-hands ; one pointing to the maternal 
Idea whence it proceeded, the other to 
that superior one of the series whither it 
ascends. Facts prove hypocrites in the 
sanctuary of the heart : profaners of holy 
sympathies by demanding reason where 
even reason is doubt in most malignant 
guise. Molecules of sodium have an in- 
tense affinity with molecules of oxygen. 
A flame of bright light denotes the chem- 
ical change. Thought reaches out into 
the Unseen toward the truth : a flame of 
light — a beacon of liberty — a star of Beth- 
lehem, denotes the authority of the man 



68 Solitarius to his Dcetnon 

over all things temporal, and a promise 
of the superior by virtue of the result on 
the moment. Light ever perceives the 
possibility of being cast into shadow by 
a brighter ray ; wisdom ever perceives an 
ultra-wisdom just beyond and above it, — 
a wisdom ruling an empire which the be- 
holding one shall soon take in heritage. 
The possession of one certitude in science 
is but a prophet forecasting a universal 
possibility beyond. Being without doing 
is death before birth ; for ever gener- 
ous action is the birthplace of a new 
excellence of character, and in character 
alone are we great of heart. Whosoever 
waits for the temporal command to do 
that duty which the spirit has made im- 
perative, is a moral coward ; and the truth 
shall deny him when the hour is at hand. 

Nature was the first great pastoral-epic 
of God ; man the first drama. Each bor- 
rows from the other a spirit transcending 
the letter. The one symbolizes and re- 
flects the other — the material, the spirit- 
ual — Truth casting a radiance upon each 



The Ephemeris of Nature 69 

which is beholden and interpreted by the 
other. The windows at the heart of man 
Nature uses to perceive her God ; and 
with like simplicity and trust the devout 
thinker through the radiating prisms of 
Nature — in the solemn, prophet-written 
Ephemeris — perceives that shadow of the 
eternal things which lie beyond the mere 
scholar's province, and therein does man's 
Deity in turn become assuringly manifest 
to him. How beautiful in all its auster- 
ity then has become the thinker's privi- 
lege to trace through all the multiplying 
highways of the rich and strange this 
republican sovereignty of Truth, and 
there find each waking day of progress 
that Omnipotence has just pressed the 
sods we touch with a boundless rever- 
ence, and has left a flaming footprint to 
direct our steps ere he passed on whither 
we plod into the doubt-misted Unknown, 
with eagerest eyes and a courageous 
trust that leaves a whole glittering world 
behind in its madness to overtake the 
divine — to encompass a single mystery 



7© Solitarius to his .Damon 

of the hidden, the unprofaned, the tran- 
scendent, man — this mortality so con- 
sciously immortal. Even in the eye of 
a fly, O Daemon, is not there a footprint 
of Omnipotence ? Even to the least with 
the best of all men of all times is the ex- 
alted festival open. With the hermits of 
Engaddi, with the Magi of old, with the 
wranglers of the Serapion, with the 
gownsmen of Pergamus, with the victors 
of the Prytaneum, with the rugged seers 
of Amsterdam, — with these and many 
more sit we at feast, O Daemon, and 
growing familiar with our exalted host- 
ess, become so mutual each to each that 
tithes of worldly import avail not to part 
or estrange us. We need the probation 
of the soul beneath our dry utilities. Use 
becomes abuse if Nature be defiled. 

The seusual man shrinks from the 
didactic ; and yet, O patient Daemon, is 
is not Nature in her happiest moods, like 
all truth however felicitously yielding to 
our languid caprices and kindly appro- 
bations, didactic in reality though liberal 
in spirit ? Throughout her wide Ephem- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 71 

eris with all the gentle amenities, that, 
while joying our feast, commands our 
esteem, is not Nature ever gowned, and 
cowled, and vested, and crowned, — all to 
the proof that the warm, angelic hand 
may grip a Titan into submission, or lash 
a scourging thunderbolt upon the refrac- 
tory neck of kings and subjects? All 
things in nature turn to light and edifi- 
cation through most rigorous and whole- 
some discipline. Every spiritual unit 
that combines with the material fact to 
make up the sublime whole of the elect 
man, founds a separate religion for its 
own, where but one mind may act as 
priest and laity, one thought the scrip- 
ture, one experiance the prophesy. Every 
material rite has a two-fold value when 
thus performed on the befitting and rev^ 
erential moment. 'Here is sand and an 
alkali : make thou a lense and snatch 
down Jupiter to your threshold, teaching 
men their insignificance ! ' ' Here is iron 
and a law of induction : whisper your 
state secrets under seas, through solid 
mountains and over wide plains, teaching 



72 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

men their grandeur ! ' ' Here too is metal 
and a law of affinity : light your homes, 
transfer your powers, print your books, 
make slaves of your lightnings ! ' ' Com- 
bine — produce ; combine — produce ! ' this 
is the never-ceasing command. This is 
the dynamic law throughout the infinite 
series. Nature asks not ' What shall I 
do ? ' She simply does. She well knows 
that there are ten abusers to every re- 
specting and thankful user of all that 
turns to edification — to wisdom and truth 
by a consecrating and devout enthusiasm 
and a believing purpose. She knows 
that the logic of the mass maintains. 
That ten fools may make ten failures; 
but that ten failures may, in turn, make 
one fool wise. That it is not the capacity 
for applying successes to good uses that 
is difficult ; but rather the capacity for 
building a temple of success out of the 
thousand failures. That one profound, 
dignified and devout failure may be of 
more sterling worth to the world than 
ten thousand flattered and pompous suc- 
cesses. That thus between an honest fail- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 73 

ure and real success there lies but an in- 
visible line which only the fool presumes 
to point out to an uncharitable world. 
That that man has ever a claim upon the 
eternal who does the noble deed for the 
nobility in the doing, leaving to mere 
triflers the reward of that which the vul- 
gar esteem success. Of that nobility no 
man can rob the hero ; even the failures 
of such an one are divine. 

And Nature knows, too, O Daemon, 
that the same mouth that puts forth the 
profound question, must answer it: an- 
swer it with a profound action. That it 
takes no great talent to ask the questions 
of a genius, but that a very god could 
not answer the simple question of a child 
without an evasion. Our very birth im- 
plies privilege. Eternity, we well know, 
O Daemon, must somewhere be rendered 
an equivalent for the infinite forces ex- 
pended in that great Somewhere in the 
bringing of each individual organism to 
life and intelligence to action, and so sus- 
taining them. The obligation implied in 
our very being — is it not then an austere 



74 Solitarius to his Dcetnon 

and transcendent one ? Must it not be 
fulfilled to the exactest letter of the law ! 
Pretension shall not, nor shall the await- 
ing of the man for the coming of the cir- 
cumstance, compensate the eternal for 
the authority of our days. In nature, O 
Daemon, nothing seems done as long as 
there is left anything to complete the 
thing accomplished ; the last mile of the 
earth's circumference proves it a circle, 
even as the last stroke of hammer at the 
forge validates the first, and justifies the 
action. Without the circle of our lives 
be complete, these several arcs, quad- 
rants and fractions only proclaim the 
bungler and the coward. It is not that 
one, O Daemon, the circle of whose life 
is largest, that stands most worthy be- 
fore the tribunal of Truth ; but rather 
that one the circle of whose refined and 
heroic days is fullest and completest in 
all the sure and exact proportions that 
proclaim the master. 

With all our boast of mediums, the 
ancients read this log-book of Nature the 



The Ephemeris of Nature 75 

truest, even if they did so by the light of 
a glow-worm instead of a blazing meteor 
as is our latter-day lamp. They drew 
their eyes down to the prophetic page so 
closely that not a significant value escaped 
them. They read with exactness, as if 
there might lie a hero's death-warrant 
between the vJtal lines. We hold the 
minutely-written Ephemeris at a calm 
distance, bringing superior side-lights and 
artificial mediums upon the solid oracle ; 
but though we read a page when they 
read but a single line, their's was learned 
by heart — lived within, and found to be 
a whole philosophy in a word. To them 
misreading and misinterpretation meant 
death ; to us it means nothing but incon- 
venience. Their one solitary line they 
could repeat forward, backward, scan- 
ning it with a poet's fervor, or laying 
down a law of values over every word. 
We can read twenty pages of this script- 
ure of ages daily ; but the prophetism ly- 
ing beneath the vital letter escapes us. 
The living spirit, like a fine ether pro- 
ceeding from the heart that lies buried 



76 Solitarius to his Damon 

in the written word, escapes our plung- 
ing, feelingless senses, and we uncon- 
sciously rob ourselves of half the joy of 
the sustained humor. 

Human thought, as Humboldt main- 
tains, elaborates itself with the progress 
of intelligence. Elaboration into trivial- 
ity marks the ebb tide of all our onward- 
moving series of progress. One may 
bring a gnat so close to the eye that it 
takes the proportion of a behemoth to the 
awed beholder. A tear on the eyelid may 
look like an ocean to the illusioned won- 
derer behind it. A mote of dust may ob- 
scure the light of day ; a fragment, the 
grand whole ; a doubt, a religion to him 
of so small, so purblind a soul that he 
must needs bring the mote to the pupil 
to behold with even such uncertain ac- 
curacy. The thinker dares not take an 
infinitesimal part, and forgetting the 
grand whole, consider it as Nature's first 
and last. God cannot be seen through 
the eye of a needle. Yet how often do 
we meet with elders and casuists whom 
we dare not but respect, who gaze upon 



The Ephemeris of Nature 77 

the visual world and judge men's ways 
therein as if they saw but through a long 
tube which magnifies not, belittles not — 
only deludes the beholder with the illu- 
sion that what he contemplates is a com- 
plete whole instead of an infinitely small 
portion of that whole. Only a large and 
exact mind can take a fragment and de- 
scribe the estimated perfection there- 
from : may see Homer in a single heroic 
line ; may behold Marco Bruno in a sin- 
gle portion of nature animate ; may de- 
fine Tintoretto in a single mellow shade 
of master depth ; Leif, in a map of the 
sea ; Rembrandt in a single etched curve ; 
Franklin in a single homely apothegm. 
Can any but a trained observer recog- 
nize and render due homage to divinity 
whenever and wherever met : in the tri- 
umph of a battle hero, in the deed of 
moral courage at the heart of a child ? 
Only the larger mind, O Daemon con- 
templates the the deed done, perceiving 
the heroism at the heart of it. Contem- 
plates the mere thought, and yet per- 
ceives the whole philosophy that lies 



78 Solitarius to his Damon 

beyond it. Contemplates the beatitude, 
perceiving the religion that warms in its 
calm and revealing embrace. Only the 
man perceives ; the presumer, the slave, 
the unthinking iconoclast merely sees. 
One becomes enlightened ; the other, 
merely learned. The Ephemeris must 
not be read in syllables to the exclusion 
or the forgetting of the whole grand epic. 
The whole must be ever kept in mind in 
the contemplation of the merest detail. 
Truth may take up a resplendent throne 
upon a single mote that flies impercept- 
ibly in the air ; let the sunshine of a 
broad mind enter there, and instantly the 
mote and its sovereign truth become per- 
ceptible ; but ah, Daemon, who but a fool 
would flatter that mote as the one elect 
and solemn dwelling place of the divinity 
whose shadow lies upon it ? 

The era of over-earnestness in our 
utilitarianisms, — of whirlwind ethics and 
grinding practicalities, of madness to 
ends regardless of the maturing and dis- 
ciplining of means, of haste, waste and 



The Ephemeris of Nature 79 

the ignoring of any philosophy of repose, 
— ah, good Daemon, marks this not the 
twilight of that wide-hearted, progressive, 
thought-compelling and ascendant day 
wherein the man is greater than his mere 
posseesion ? Man is the only object from 
which we withhold our esteem for what 
he is, rather than what he has. Even our 
dogs call forth our respect for what they 
are, when even our neighbors are damned 
for that they have not. Our honor and 
shame but from condition rise : most 
cruel turning of the poet's scripture to 
the dog's commonplace. Mediocrity, the 
meat and drink of the levelling age, is 
the death-warrant of the soul. It is that 
conventionally straight line that runs 
along the perilous brink of stagnation 
and the helpless coalescence of forces, 
to the crushing down of the individual 
man. The day that is not a constant 
series of hourly triumphs — a constant 
birth and upbuilding through the tempo- 
ral toward the eternal — a life not one 
brave, on-waging repetend of conquest, 
with every day a laurel for a heroism as- 
sured—these are the living, mal-auguring 



80 Solitarhis to his Damon 

symbols of retrogression and death. It 
is — and sorely to our shame, O Daemon, 
— a straight line, that broad, conventional 
highway through the plateaus of this lat- 
itudinal age, that we pray to follow on 
with such slavish exactness of detail 
throughout eternity ; yet it is a straight 
line from success to failure — from heaven 
to hell. Our epochs are angles ; our 
distances to other angles, eras. No life 
has a right to proclaim itself a straight 
line. If the thinker's highway from the 
cradle to the grave were such, we should 
know no sciences, no arts, no spiritual 
economies to stimulate and freshen the 
more revealing man, and for these and our 
unforced and unforcing discipline there- 
in, be the less men. There is true beauty 
and nobility in every curve, a problem 
for a great soul's laboring out in every 
angle of our tragic condition, — a problem 
worthy a most cautious skill and coura- 
geous resolves. Man is born supple to 
any curve or angle the existing circum- 
stance may exact. Gautama's, nor So- 
lon's, nor Galileo's, nor John Howard's 



The Ephemeris of Nature 81 

splendid highway to that perfection to- 
ward which they so devoutly labored to 
exalt mankind, was, or could be by the 
very nature of their broad achievements, 
a straight line. By the very brokenness 
of their paths were they directed and 
self-proven, and thus in turn became the 
disciplinarians of centuries. Fact as mere 
fact is a straight-line datum; and as such 
finds no record in the Ephemeris that 
abhors the mere titular convenience ; for 
only the soul that encompasses the given 
fact can distroy this presuming peerage 
of the material. 'T is said that the right- 
eous way is the straight and narrow one ; 
but presumably all corridors are straight, 
though the pathway to the outer port 
leads through many an Asian mystery 
and Hyrcanian wood. To live out the 
symbol of a straight-line absolutism at 
heart, is to stand dogged in the highways 
of better men, a passive, passionless im- 
potence of conformity, — a brazen crypt 
of too familiar usage — an extrinsic cy- 
pher standing for naught in itself, though 
but one spiritual unit before it magnifies 






82 Solitarius to his Dcetnon 

into a ten-fold value that which before 
was nothing. It is only the hero that 
ventures from the coward's straight-line 
highway, seeking his courageous footing 
on the solid darkness, finding and assur- 
ing to the heart of man, that which hath 
not entered his mind ere this quiet, sub- 
duing prophet arose and proclaimed it. 

Who then is the elect by the oneness 
of his aim, by the surveillance of his op- 
portunities and the consecration of his 
days to the vitality of truth within him, 
to be one with the gods and one with 
men ? Who then bears the ' open sesame' 
of an angel and the language of a peas- 
ant ? — the soul of a saint with the lips of 
a child ? What limitations canst thou 
set upon the thinker's province, O pre- 
sumptuous usurer, or what duty that 
such an one shall not ultimately encom- 
pass a hundred fold ? And still think 
not that a great spirit must necessarily 
stand removed from the sufferance and 
sympathies of men. The power that can 
bind up a wound in nature, can bind up 



The Ephemeris of Nature 83 

a little sorrow in the heart of a child ; and 
at every believing with things divine, is 
become more understanding^ one with 
men. Inspiration begins with humility. 
Arrogance and assumption have no part 
in the drama of truth ; they are at vari- 
ance with the gods, even as they are with 
themselves. Humility is the first degree 
of godship. 

A thousand minds are at the philos- 
opher's pen-point. He but remantles de- 
cayed kingdoms and effete monarchies of 
ideas with habiliments of modern vogue, 
regaling these skeleton prophets of de- 
cling systems with new temples, and 
ceasing to talk of wisdom as if it had not 
heralded the very sun and stars. The 
brightest truth is but the shadow of a 
bright soul, even as the brightest noon is 
called the shadow of God. Every heart 
is a valley of darkness which has never 
yet known the refulgent light of day, — 
never yet known more than a sort of 
uncertain twilight to the exploring eye 
of man. The lamp of perfect seeing 
has never reached the deeps of the man 



84 Solitarius to his Damon 

mortal any more than of the man immor- 
tal. They are like the vast ravines in the 
Alps, the depths of which the sun never 
reaches. Men that are quite impervious 
to heat and cold, are much the same to 
everything else ; so closely are allied the 
physical and mental conditions. If noth- 
ing makes us suffer, nothing rouses us 
to very exalted action. The keenly sen- 
sitive organism is the one treasury of our 
arts and philosophies as of our pessi- 
misms and distrust ; it is the god in the 
man drawn so close to the surface that 
commonplace joys and griefs become 
magnified, and the man becomes an ex- 
tremist for good or for evil, as heredity 
and education throw the balance of pow- 
er. This extreme sensitiveness is alike 
capable of exquisite suffering and the 
most spiritualizing joy. Sensitive to ef- 
fects of certain causes, the philosopher — 
the eminently sensitive man — becomes 
equally sensitive to the causes them- 
selves. He experiences a period of phil- 
osophic gestation with every contact with 
a new fact bearing a principle, — contact 



The Ephemeris of Nature 85 

which common qualities perceive not, 
nor can be influenced by. These thou- 
sand minds at the verge of every utter- 
ance are collaborators with him at the 
eternal forge, whether of to-day or of a 
thousand years gone. Whatever their 
source and lineage, they have become 
contemporaneous with the man with the 
issue of the thought, surviving all gener- 
ations of material record. Only then is 
the philosopher wholesomely indepen- 
dent of, and dares unrestrictedly to ig- 
nore with content, all abstract relations 
of time and place. Who but such an one 
dares flourish the wand of the Lydian 
melodist over the hills of New England ; 
or the rod of Hypatia over the Missouri ; 
or turn the Wisconsin dells into Athenian 
porticos ; or Idaho plains into Brahmin 
solitudes, — all by force of individual will ? 
We stand indifferent to that which no 
greater genius before us has made a liv- 
ing and inspiring influence ; but how full 
of awe are we before that which seems to 
have all eyes and mouths, inspiriting and 
speaking with prophet-tongues the history 



S6 Solitarius to his .Dcemon 

of one or of a nation which the centuries 
have honored ! Ben Lomon joys us ; 
Chamounix awes us ; Waterloo fires us; 
Corinth makes us grave ; Hebron, devo- 
tional ; Benares, contemplative ; Dam- 
bool with its solemn cave temples and 
tropical setting, reserved, questioning 
and estranged. Yet wherefore this most 
strained and unfructile reading of Art's 
enlightening by Nature? Have we not 
now the same Nature and the identical 
arts to be enlightened and enthused by 
the breath of the inspired man, and so in 
turn made histories of ? But all in vain. 
It is a fool's reason, and yet, O Daemon, 
seemingly not a most adequate one? — 
that Nature at my doorstep is almost 
wholly voiceless, while her becomingly 
tender and warm-hearted speech just be- 
yond and obscured from my own com- 
monplace demesne, thrills as with ten 
thousand tongues of richest enchantment. 
The truth there visible before us is the 
composite of many truths behind it. The 
Roman poet's frensy, so spontaneous to 
every thoughtful mind on the Tiber's 



The Ephemeris of Nature 87 

side, will not be counterfeited on the 
Ohio banks. The breath of Gautama 
that pervades the Bo-tree of Ceylon will 
not exhale from the cedars of Lebenon, 
nor the Conqueror's oak of Windsor, nor 
the giant firs of the Yosemite. The voice 
of Paul on Mars hill, or of John on the 
sea-girt ledge of Patmos, will not grow 
articulate to the conscious heart on the 
Birkshire hills, or the Isle of Man. A 
new spirit and even a profounder per- 
sonality than any of these must rise and 
of the very sods of prairies and the arid 
steeps ot our uninspired commonplaces 
make shrines and altar-places where men 
may kneel and proclaim the very foot- 
prints of such an one a source of devout 
enthusiasm. A new and a great inter- 
preting genius must stand between man 
and his revered Nature, else is he blind 
and reluctant to the truths that are his 
by worthiest inheritance. Nothing has 
that indefinable but most certain realiz- 
ing power nor a language for us, that has 
not found a mutual tongue, — something 
of a reciprocal factor serving as a con- 



88 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

necting link between the seen and the 
unseen, — between the tangible and the 
intangible — the unassuring fact and its 
spiritual adjunct. Forever following the 
inherited predilection — this spice of hero- 
worship which we ignore in others, yet 
will not argue out of our own precon- 
ceiving minds — we glance over the heads 
of the intervening epochs, contemplating 
the man, the nation, the divinity that 
illumines the horizon bounding it. 

And we demand, too, O Daemon, to 
have the triumphs of even the seventh- 
heaven gods brought down to human in- 
terest. They must be made tangible al- 
most to the sensuous touch to instruct our 
regard. To be humanity, — to breathe, ex- 
hale, and live humanity — all must be 
made human. Even the sublimest of 
sceneries must become personalized, the 
most estranged of philosophies, the most 
wizard-struck strain, the most star-inwov- 
en sonnet, the most Titan-ranting trag- 
edy — all are 'as sounding brass or a tink- 
ling cymbal ' if they receive not the pro- 
bation of the flesh and enter the house- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 89 

hold of the man rather than his worship. 
What has Zoroaster become, translated 
from the Persian groves to the Massachu- 
setts coast ? — a mere exile estranged and 
imwondered. What is Buddhism on the 
Potomac to Buddhism under the very 
Delada at Kandy ? — merely a symbol that 
withholds its truest oracle for want of an 
adequate receptacle. What is Plato un- 
der the willow of the St. Croix to Plato 
under the very eaves of the Temple of the 
Winds? St. Paul on the plains of Utah 
to St. Paul on the heights of Corinth ? — 
and yet, O Daemon, wherefore ? Should 
not thought be thought — the greater rul- 
ing the lesser the wide world over, dis- 
tinguishable, definable, exact? Only om- 
nipotence, even in this least preternat- 
ural light, has the power of transporting 
whole empires at will, bearing on these 
broad shoulders over continents and seas 
the shrines, sanctuaries and legislatures 
of every age and zone, and setting them 
up as household gods about the hearth- 
stone of the extreme Occident. Such an 
one not only can, but must, speak : there 



90 Solitarius to his Damon 

is no midway alternative. Talent may, or 
may not, be withheld, and in turn, may 
or may not withhold ; the mission of such 
an one is of secondary import in this 
larger current of affairs, — a second mes- 
sage from a source that has known a 
forerunner infinitely greater than he. 
But genius has a primal message — a di- 
rect proclaiming from the gods which 
will not be contained in the mere hollow 
of mortality. Such an one must and will 
speak, whether his audience blesses, ig- 
nores, honors or damns him. Talent ca- 
ters, and hence covets applause of those 
it would amuse or instruct ; genius, quite 
contrariwise, rarely prospers basking lion- 
like in this parhelion-light — this mock- 
sunbeam of society approval. Genius 
becomes, at last, a sort of never-ceasing, 
God-enthused monologue of passions, 
secret triumph and secret questionings — 
a splendid drama of the restless, error- 
haunted heart of man, merely the faint- 
est echoes of which break through the 
rugged walls that part the world from 
that infinite audience and player in one 



The Ephemeris of Nature 91 

castled up in that throbbing, flaming, 
tragic prison-stage of a human breast. 
Genius loves to be heard and revered of 
men, even for so small a portion of its 
diviner evidences as finds ready medium 
in the labors of its hand ; but it demands 
no audience, if it be of the truest qual- 
ity, and indeed thrives best without 
one, unless, perchance, stern hisses com- 
mingle the plaudits. O Daemon, has not 
applause corrupted more genius than 
ever adversity crushed? Truth smiles 
equal content in the face of applauding 
angels and the deriding armies of the 
damned. What ! Daemon ; would you 
put a god to rout with a quill ? What! 
would you proffer him pap who banquets 
with Plato ? 

Socrates, Shelley, Bruno, Balzac, Wes- 
ley, Wordsworth, — how many perceiving, 
realizing, furthering respecters had these ? 
— how many exalting, coefficient spirits 
with hallowed, faith-taking love, was each 
privileged ? But, O Daemon, spake they 
not all the bolder for the very indiffer- 



92 Solitarius to his Dczmon 

ence of the world, for the hate of parti- 
san, for the snarl of bigot, and the coast 
as conspicuously clear of adorers as of 
radical antagonists, the former often more 
disastrous to ascendant genius than the 
latter. A great spirit, like the overflow- 
ing Nile, follows into fulfilment a law be- 
yond all material question. It cannot be 
prayed down, nor cursed down, nor 
fought down, nor scorned down. It flows 
steadily on, inundating here, despoiling 
there the properties of a score, while en- 
riching yonder the soils of the ten thou- 
sand, ameliorating and assuring to godlier 
ends the adversities of a whole republic. 
But the heart is ever generous ; only the 
mind kisses conceit. The heart of man 
is ever true ; it is only when its pure and 
God-native outpourings pass through the 
mind and become polluted with the sen- 
sual thought that what bears the creden- 
tials of the heart works such ineffectual 
ends, achieving but the coward's tri- 
umph. The heart is ever charitable, 
believing, large-eyed, magnanimous ; only 
the organs of egotism turn carper. Man 



The Ephemeris of Nature 93 

is all egoist till the soul is stirred ; then 
he becomes universalized, humanitized; 
a moment gone, passive, unapproachably 
inert, unresolved ; now, all daring to new 
purpose ; all nobility, valiance, manhood. 
The thought has become metamorphosed 
into an action ; the mortality into a god- 
likeat symbol of power and worth. Man, 
till the heart is stirred, is a walking whim. 
Now he swears he sees ; now he thinks 
he sees ; and now, as the processes of 
logic put down the mutinous whims, he 
thinks it quite doubtful ; and thus through 
all the enlightening phases nurses his 
disquieting self-skepticism, and finally 
resolving that he does not, and never 
did see. Ah, Daemon, what havoc will 
not a little reason play at the heart of a 
big presumption ? The mind of man is 
an implacable, leaping headlong contra- 
diction till the heart overthrows this un- 
worthy autocracy of a whim ; then phil- 
osophy gives over to faith ; arrogance, to 
humility ; storm, to quiet, tact, discretion 
and progress. 






94 Solitarius to his Damon 

The fountain-heads of great things 
are magnificently small. They jet forth 
truth like a fine ether diffusing and col- 
oring all eternity to its resplendent tint. 
The soul, thank God, is beyond the Dev- 
il's fingermarks. The spirit is the mor- 
tal's trust fund ; it can never sink or be 
bankrupt. The mouth of every river of 
feeling is a delta. As the effluent soul 
proceeds from heart to mouth, is widens 
and catholicizes, till a single word spoken 
in the midnight solitude of the hermit's 
closet may diffuse itself over all enlight- 
ened areas of ages and zones, tinting all 
eternity with its refined and earnest 
quality. Buddha spoke a single word, 
and all the deep-mOst areas of the Kapi- 
lavastu were inundated. 

Every atom of dust, every drop of wa- 
ter, every native molecule of materiality 
is a microcosm standing as a symbol of 
completeness. The unit of the material 
universe is found in the minutest inte- 
gral datum ; the unit of the spiritual is 
in the one moment's thought, deed or 
word to the proving of divinity behind it. 



The Ephemeris of Nature 95 

The eternal may lie in the latent folds 
of one solitary, humble, God-appealing 
dream of a child ; the infinite may lie 
like a sleeping god in the great heart- 
throb of one despised and crushed of 
men. Nothing passes the borders of 
of the heart that is not weighed with ex- 
actest beneficence and given its proper- 
est place and values. Every idea is a 
symbol of the universal Idea — the per- 
fection of all ideas. Geology proves 
granite, lime and sandstone to be the cin- 
ders of a vast primeval fire. Nature gives 
us a cubic inch of chalk, demonstrating 
to us a moral truth in the fact that it 
contains the skeletons of forty millions of 
once living, breathing animalculae. Ev- 
ery thing in nature must 4 suffer a sea- 
change* into a new moral idea, becoming 
a prophet over a certain futurity ; like 
the mummy of Rameses II. risen to de- 
liver a golden homily to the thinking 
age after a sea-change of three thousand 
years. The feeling principle is the me- 
diator between the varied extremes of 
the mind's antitheses ; the harmonizer of 



g6 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

the mind's discord ; the liberator of the 
subjugated thought, proving it worthy of 
the honor of men. It intensifies what- 
ever it touches ; a cubing power wholly 
its own making a thing of radiance of 
that which otherwise bears the stamp of 
mere commonplace. Only earnestness 
is thought. The province of the thinker 
it the all-catholicized. It is the generic 
formula representing the root and essen- 
tiality of things, the ego of all assured 
personality, the moving power that knows 
no law of statics. 

The first law of the ascendant series is 
resignation. This is the first word of 
the first chapter of Nature's gospel 
Ephemeris ; the first enlightened reading 
of the phases of truth which so mystify 
us oftentimes in the apparent transpar- 
ency of the moment. Resignation was 
the first Philosopher's stone turning 
all things to gold that it touched, and so 
proclaimed the man. Resignation was 
the first seed of the forbidden apple 
plucked in the Garden by the 'mother of 
all our woe.' Shift your cross upon an- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 97 

other's shoulder : it will come back upon 
you when less able to bear it. Cast it to 
earth : you will stumble over it in the 
dark. Cast it into hell : it will drag you 
down with it. Bear it, and it will in turn 
bear you. There is a universal law that 
respects not the individual insubordina- 
tion — the obdurate one. Jupiter will not 
halt in its high orbit to answer your 
questions. Death, the unknown, the in- 
evitable — these grant no ears to argu- 
ment. The Pythian oracles were false. 
The true oracles are the unworded : the 
stars, the ocean, the forest, firmament, 
gravitation and the grave, with the great 
believing heart of man throbbing audibly 
through all and every portion of all, — 
these speak with a silence surpassing 
eloquence, answering all our praying, 
demanding, beseeching, defying, hoping, 
abandoned prayers for the light with a 
single word — resignation. 

The spark of godship in the human 
heart cannot be hid. Be it heaped with 
all corruptions of flesh and forgetfulness 



98 Solitarius to his Dozmon 

of spirit that low-born condition is un- 
willing heir to, it is a portion of the God 
in life-trust to the heart of man, and can- 
not be crushed out. Choke it, smother 
it, heap upon it the carrion crimes or 
faith in false deities that mark the de- 
scendent race, it shall remain, and some 
day shall pierce this eclipsing corruption 
and shine forth an immortality that shall 
not be mistaken of its Creator. Truth 
has written the names of her dead lovers 
— Ferdusi, Alhazen, Knox, Howard, — 
on the very hearthstones of our mod- 
ern ideas. She shatters the rock and 
shows us one of her offerings of a thou- 
sand years gone, to prove that truth is 
imperishable. She tears down an ice- 
berg and shows us a mastodon, or some 
relic to the proof that when the poles 
were tropics and long before, she was 
there. On the white Alpine glaciers she 
strews the dust of other planets till the 
druid peaks look like scarlet-tinted beds 
of Paradise, — all to the solemn proof that 
even there Truth is, and that before all, 
Truth was. 



The Ephemeris of Nature 99 

Only inaction hangs over our un- 
helmeted heads the curse of the prophets 
pendent as by a single hair. Decay as a 
datum of progress is the study of the true 
believer. Nature in decay is qualified 
with a sovereign interpretation when 
that decay has its index finger pointing 
toward a super-excellence. Death with 
all its magnified conventionalities of hor- 
ror, bears in the shrunken palm a creden- 
tial that points to the perfect man. With 
Nature as bounty-giver, what may not 
the thinking heart expect or demand ? — 
with Nature as interpreter, what script- 
ure too profound. To ask with the cry 
of a bat, and be answered with a thunder- 
bolt. To ask with the present spirit, and 
be answered with the prophetism of ages. 
To question in the demanding roar of a 
behemoth, to be answered with the soft 
breath of summer. To ask alms with a 
religion of rebellion, and receive a lash ; 
with a devout resignation, and receive a 
heart's-ease that shall not falter. To ask 
with idea, receiving a stone ; with a faith, 
receiving a kingdom. How majestic then 



Solitarius to his Damon 



are all these several adjustments of the 
Nature spiritual, O Daemon, and how 
true each to each and to their Sovereign ! 
Surely the lamp of God in a worthy pur- 
pose cannot be extinguished. 

We respect and put a hundred fold de- 
pendence in him who bids us ignore his 
support, — who proves that within our- 
selves lie the chiefer incentives to activ- 
ity — that we are our own stimulants on 
to authority. Church, state, politics, so- 
ciety — these would forever encumber the 
upright man with props, supports, crutch- 
es, balancing-poles, as if he were a crip- 
ple or a tight-rope walker instead of a 
reliant, thinking intuition. The small 
philosopher would put the human race 
to bed — make children and invalids of 
strong sinews and steel-firm nerves — 
would snatch a man from his splendid 
republican eminence and cradle him in 
puny pessimisms and flattering material- 
ities that commiserate his state and con- 
done his weaknesses, as if virtue consisted 
in cursing the Destinies for our vices. 
But the thinker is the erect temple of all 



The Ephemeris of Nature 101 

our trust ; it is he who snatches us from 
these cribs of abject circumstance, and 
commands us to walk the craven dusts 
like a reasoner and a god. The progress- 
ive times have no tolerance for, nor mild- 
ness of nature in the presence of, the 
thou-art-nothing preacher. He holds a 
clammy hand of stagnation upon all 
these throbbing young upward-arrowed 
forces of the times ; he is an abomination 
in the face of honest absolutism and the 
dignity of labor. What right have I to 
cast a shadow in your pathway that shall 
frighten you into the belief that what is 
here merely an illusion is a mountain of 
adversities, a very pit of plagues, and the 
hell of failure lies beyond it ? What right 
has the most dogmatic iconoclast to put 
a yoke upon my neck because other men 
indulge him thus ? — to prop me up be- 
cause other men cannot stand alone ? 
Who calls young Endeavor a failure, calls 
him a traitor. Endeavor was never born 
to failure ; it cannot fail. The triumph 
of the deed is in the doing ; the triumph 
of life is the infinite Now. 



Solitarius to his Damon 



Nature in the very wholesome light of 
her eyes bears a sweet word of encour- 
agement for even the least of her subject 
lovers. Whosoever bears a humble yet 
all-reliant heart, a great good thought he 
would to enlarge into a creation, a spirit 
all enthusiasm, all humanity, — whosoever 
in this God-appealing mood lifts a calm 
libation to Nature, swearing her signal 
offices upon him, has seen her wide eyes 
glisten as the noon, her pulse quickened 
to receive and confide in him, and heard 
her answering word : The less than thou 
have done deeds of great manhood to the 
honor of mankind and to the glory of 
mankind's God. Nature holds out but a 
hand of charity to any consecrate effort 
for the betterment of condition ; all char- 
ity for charity — the oracle beyond price 
for the mere asking. Truth tries the man 
and loves beyond all to find him not 
wanting. She thrives on the Archimedes 
principle : weighing the crowns of king 
and churl, determining the corrupting, 
hardening alloys of each, estimating the 
qualities of the man by the amount of 



The Ephemeris of Nature 103 

eternity he displaces. In every highway 
of the honest endeavor, noon or mid- 
night, tropic or pole, she is there, whis- 
pering assurance and applause. She bids 
the young heart steal out of the solitary 
bosom, making homes in a thousand ten- 
der breasts less warm, mayhap, less pure, 
less beautiful, and throb like a star in the 
abandoned deeps of that estranged and 
soundless nature till the dead and pas- 
passionless trunk be thrilled with self- 
realizations and self-reverence that marks 
the advent of a risen purpose over the 
darkness of a doubting and coward heart. 
She bids man forswear his sordid temples 
to the false gods, disdain the petty fore- 
ground, and school the refined senses 
upon the distance which the common eye 
beholds but interprets not, bringing the 
sharp outlines down into an active lever- 
age upon the immediate and the contem- 
porary. Truth would behold her God 
through the heart of man. She damns 
detail that would be a god, — the part that 
would assume the prerogatives of com- 
pleteness — the churl that parades in the 



104 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

habit of a king. Truth holds religions, 
philosophies, systems, arts, saints, seers, 
dynasties, republics, — all at a rigid arm's 
length, dealing with them in magnificent 
circumferences. She beholds the whole 
and each individual part as a unit : one 
star, one beatitude, one purpose, one 
faith, one God. 

But mistake not that the true thinker 
kills his own reverence for the divine in 
the little. God is the God of the true 
and the beautiful wherever it is manifest. 
Truth is no more a respecter of dimen- 
sions than of persons. In a minute inte- 
gral portion of a grand whole may lie a 
large, latent truth, a complete and firmly 
established law, an individual identity. 
The thinker being no worshipper of ab- 
stract immensities, seeks feeling wherev- 
er it may be found most genuine ; truth 
wherever it be most natively embodied. 
No insect nor plant, no tint nor fossil, 
no melody nor couplet, but may further 
a great revolutionizing maintenance in 
the heart of the man, and so in the heart 
of the nation ; but all these as mere in- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 105 

sect, mere plant, mere fossil, mere mel- 
ody, mere animal and vegetable repre- 
sentatives of the same, he casts behind 
him with proper indifference. They hold 
out for him no tempting fertilities ; no 
furtherances to this austere and solemn 
argument of life which is the thinker's 
province. These little substantives for 
completeness that weave not a new virtue 
into the tense fabric of our days, start not 
a great globe of thought on a wide and 
worthy orbit, or preserve a maternal 
truth from profane hands, cannot be as- 
similated to the thinker's spirit, nor be 
brought into focus in this synthesis of 
the heart. 

True genius is but a childlike nature- 
seeker from the least toward the highest — 
from the within outward. It is but a 
progressive power of assimilation in the 
empire of the true. Where this faculty 
of assimilation is natively great, there is 
greatness ; but where it is not, there the 
man counts merely as a cup-bearer of the 
gods, but not one with them, — a price- 



106 Solitarius to his .Dcemon 

less coffer of sacred oils distilled from the 
flowers of all material creation ; but use- 
less indeed save to cater to the sensual. 
He is not that flower-producing, star- 
building, love-working, thought-compell- 
ing spirit of ascendency which the chosen 
one may be. The eye must contemplate 
all things not as created, but as creating. 
The genius of Humboldt, or Obermann, 
or Shakespeare, or Keats, passed beyond 
the climax of material use, and no longer 
beheld the visual world merely as a crea- 
tion but as creating, — each minute inte- 
gral portion of the composite whole as a 
multiplier of that same — an index to one 
of a higher spiritual value. The star, the 
mountain, the tree, the twilight, the fact, 
the passion, the fancy, — aye, the mean- 
est object that has an enlarging force and 
helps to circle out this infinite measure 
of things put to beneficent uses — these 
appeared to them as divine suggestions 
of something higher and infinite capable 
of an ethical interpretation. The thing 
of commonplace has become a living la- 
conism ; the* vulgar negative has become 



The Ephemeris of Nature 107 

a most proper positive ; the indolent 
phrase, a pointed aphorism ; the silent 
thought, a worded prophet ; the simple 
babe, a profound oracle. The wings of 
a thousand years may fold over the eyes 
of such a spirit, and still it is as noonday 
within. The roughening contentions 
and the sordid animalisms of affairs of 
worldly retrogression may clog the deli- 
cate hearing and dull the exquisite pal- 
ate ; but still that nature within and that 
nature without keep up these calm and 
constant mutualities, and a world be- 
comes enlightened in the reflection of 
that divine flash caused by the meeting 
of truth and truth — the eternal with the 
mortal — on a realizing plane of action 
and influence. And, O Daemon, there is 
no medium of that truth which lies within 
and the truth that is without that can 
long remain hidden or obscured. The 
most hardened inveteracy comes soon 
into a condition of self-seeing which the 
man, but not the world, can do naught 
but recognize, — a position of self-knowing 
most wise. Truth proceeds from the with- 



108 Solitarius to his Damon 

in outward, striking, as it were, an infin- 
ite series of radii from the heart of man 
through the circumference of the mere 
mortality to the heart of every living unit 
of the visual world. The thinker becomes, 
as it were, an acting and qualified nerve- 
centre — a most impressionable sensory 
ganglion — which gathers truth moment- 
ly from multiplied sources throughout 
the universal frame, combining and pro- 
ducing, and finding the ultimate factor 
therein. Truth rolls away the stone from 
the sepulchre of the fact, and lo ! the 
spirit is free. 

Diamonds are not found companion- 
ing sapphires, rubies and emeralds ; but 
ever alone and by nature estranged in 
some far-off corner of the planet. The 
diamond-hearted man crystallizes into 
lustre and worth only by slow and pa- 
tient process in the most estranged and 
retired tranquility, even ignorant of his 
own worth, it may be, undiscovered even 
to himself, till he is brought forth into 
the full noonday light of eras. Time to 



The Ephemeris of Nature 109 

the diamond-hearted man is not a thing 
which suggests sun-dial and hour-glasses, 
monthly moons and natal days ; but in 
his ears it sounds the voice of eternity of 
which one moment is as good as another, 
so it be filled with the profits of honesty 
and purpose. There is no sun-dial of the 
gods ; man is the only pendulum of eter- 
nity. Time is recorded only by the do- 
ings of men ; there is no time to the soul ; 
from eternity it was, and to eternity re- 
mains ; the soul is eternity. To us, shall 
it be proven that the past and future are 
like friends parted on earth and re-united 
in the seventh circle. The honest Effort's 
hour is as good as any other's hour, — any 
man's or angel's hour. The great soul 
walks the earth no matter when : before, 
or contemporaneous with Christ, Epicte- 
tus, Socrates, Solon or John of Ghent, or 
a thousand years after the birth of this 
republic : what matters this ? This little 
span is but a hair's breadth in the chron- 
ology of God ; but a stroke of the pen in 
the history of a soul. 



Solitarius to his Damon 



Great circles demand a contact with 
great circles in order that each may esti- 
mate, and be estimated by, the other with 
proper recognition of the mutual quality. 
Only a large act is a worthy companion 
to a large act ; and only superior contact 
insures superior thinking, superior mind- 
values, superior refining qualities. The 
broader the mind, the less diffusing be- 
comes that concentrative power of analy- 
sis that we esteem intellect. The science 
of trivialities is forgotten in the science 
of the heart, — of the intuitions which are 
too profound to deal with aught save 
the principles that enclose whole empires 
of the merely trivial. What thinker but 
despises this entomology of the soul, — 
this pompous straining at the infinitesi- 
mal livers of a gnat, while the very es- 
tates of era on era, of world on world, 
of possibility on possibility, are bent 
down for the thinker and the man to 
place his foot of sovereignty upon ? The 
thought-atoms, soul-atoms, god-atoms, — 
these of the mere intellectualist become 



The Ephemeris of Nature 



transcendent under the thinker's purify- 
ing touch ; become thought-worlds, soul- 
worlds, god-worlds, — infinite, life-giving, 
truth-giving. O Daemon ! there are mil- 
lions to court the million ; but one to be 
the man. The whole drama of a nation, 
of an era, of a system, revolves about one 
part. The centre of any circle, however 
boundless, is only a point, — a throne but 
large enough for a single mind — for a 
single personality. Do thou the gods' 
work : let slaves do theirs. Your labor, 
whatsoever it be, if the heart is there, 
has become the god's labor. Only the 
slave despises the labor of his hand ; so 
is it but half done, the heart being ab- 
sent, the mind estranged, the art con- 
founded, the man degraded. True dig- 
nity loves the labor of its hand, however 
menial and seemingly unworthy of the 
moment its beginnings be. That man is 
king who has done his best ; the smallest 
deed accomplished has become in the 
heart of such an one, a disciplinarian to 
a greater virtue than is manifest in the 
unwilling beneficence of a prince, or the 



Solitarius to his Dcemon 



pompous charities of a churl. 

Only the power that performs has the 
true power of belief in the performed. 
The thirst for the infinite through all 
the latitudes of the finite — this is the 
prime and finality of the reasoner's gos- 
pel of affinities. The soul's very proper 
unrest in the exigency of the present is 
the very credential of progress— the very 
passport into the place of triumph. We 
all thirst for that which bears the flavor 
of the gods — which, melting upon our 
dry palates, proves the nectar of rare and 
ancient distillation. It is most willing 
and vital intoxication. Man's thirst for 
the divine is the prime proof of his divin- 
ity : higher truth seeking the highest. 
By this thirst are we taught that in the 
universality of law, nothing is fortuitous 
or arbitrary of God or mankind ; nothing 
rewardless or crownless that not so de- 
serves ; nothing that thinks can long re- 
main enslaven to common trivial cyphers, 
and in the calm assurance of these alone 
is the scrutiny of intellect in all things 
justified. 



The Ephemeris of Nature 113 

To the eyes of a reasoner on this most 
high and native place of worship, the 
horizon appears denned and undissem- 
bled. To the mere dreamer, all is a 
maze and an outline : ridges, pinnacles, 
obelisks and cones swallowed up in the 
inexact glamour of a phantasy — the real 
presuming to wear the habit of a phan- 
tasm and a fiction. The dreamer sees 
faces and forms in clouds, on jagged- 
edged cliffs and intangible glooms, mis- 
taking them for actualities, as St. Simeon 
mistook for facts the merest fictions of 
his religious frensies. But only the clear- 
visioned, crystal-thinking reasoner can 
penetrate masses, put the ill-definable 
distances into character, and disclose to 
even idolizing worshippers the interior 
element of exterior illusion. These ex- 
tremes of the dreamer draw out the fine 
ductile thread of the intellect till it will 
not sustain its own weight, to say nothing 
of the divinity imposed upon it. Only a 
fool would attempt to ride a gossamer to 
battle. 

The thinker is but a solitary searcher 



ii4 Solitarius to his Dcztnon 

for the good and the true through this 
all-prevailing midnight of the mind — 
this twilight-land of circumstance and 
peril where even the most God-endued 
prophet sees but darkly. What though 
he be as one famished at times with long 
searching and futile endeavor, and with 
dulled and leaden sense, unconsciously 
turns marauder in the helpless abandon- 
ment of the hour ? What though he run 
down a princely thought, strips it of its 
jewels which he mistook in the darkness, 
and clothing that one in rags who wore 
a prince's cloak, so bring it to light ? 
How soon discovers he his mistake, and 
how willingly makes restitution a thou- 
sand fold ! It is none the less prince for its 
rags. But what if here or there in this 
uncertain maze of fact and philosophy, 
I grope into an unexplored province and 
there stumble upon a solitary, uncrowned 
but most worthy King-thought shivering 
in a beggar's habit — a veritable Titan 
wandering world-wide in nakedness and 
want ? — may I not be privileged to en- 
mantle him in purple and ermine as 



The Ephemeris of Nature 115 

befits his state, and set him godwise upon 
his throne? Nothing stimulates the man 
as to find a sovereign thought in rags, and 
be privileged to befriend it as becomes 
him with all due reverence and respect, 
vaunting to himself no vantage nor hon- 
or save that of a duty done. What glory 
will not that sovereign in turn bestow 
upon his recognizer, his liberator, his 
benefactor ? The line betwixt assimila- 
tion and that which, for lack of an apter 
term, we call originality, is often too fine 
even for the most conscientious and re- 
fined perception. Indeed, good Daemon, 
what thought can we name that is not 
the amalgamation of a score of others 
behind it, — the product of a whole series 
of heroic circumstances and conditions. 
The line that divides assimilation and 
originality is beyond the placing of the 
exactest critic ; as on a peak of the Alps 
one might sit astride the apex with one 
foot in France, the other in Switzerland, 
and no man that can point the line with 
exactness. 

In truth, O Daemon, does not every 



n6 Solitarius to his Damon 

man's uttered thought lawfully become 
every thinker's principal without usury? 
Whosoever that would hold his ideas in 
monopoly must let them die with him 
unworded. Yet be assured of two things, 
O presuming Thinker! First, if you ever 
discover a truth worth the world's know- 
ing, or evolve a thought worth the world's 
thinking, the world will have it in spite 
of you. You can no more contain it 
than you can stop the constant beating of 
your own heart at will. You can copy- 
right the manner, but you cannot copy- 
right the man. Truth and a profound 
manhood behind it are one with all men 
and of all ages. Second, your discovered 
truth renounces its parental authority 
with the utterance. It wears your name 
and a semblance to your feature for a time, 
but soon the world forgets you in contem- 
plating your offspring, and the indepen- 
dence of the thought is forever estab- 
lished. 

Man delights in the thoughts of supe- 
rior men — thoughts constantly in the van 
of yesterday's thoughts — in advance of to- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 117 

day's doings. In these contemplations the 
heart never grows old. Beauty and love 
keep parallel paths with this refined epi- 
curean of high thoughts — him whose 
love for the rare and delicate tracings of 
an incisive mind upon rare and delicate 
fabrics, becomes his intellectual meat, 
drink and rule of action. And yester- 
day's thought in to-day's heart becomes 
to-day's thought — becomes a new tri- 
umph and a new thought. With every 
new thought — every refilling of the gold- 
en cup of our days with a new truth — 
there is a new man at the flagon's brim 
to drink it ; and, more than that, he is a 
new man at heart each day he indulges 
his humor. 

The past serves a purpose ; but no man 
that can help it will live in the whited 
sepulcher of a dead day. Now is the 
only utterance of the heart that reaches 
the lips of the brave. Halt ! Retreat ! — 
these are the commands of the dead days 
and of living cowards. These are the 
hieroglyphics of the age of helots that 
gave way to the republican — the true 



n8 Solitarius to his Damon 

golden age. To waver is downfall ; the 
insignia of the hesitating arm is 'Death.' 
Ideas are refined and certain leverages 
upon ideas — those of thinkers dead upon 
those of thinkers living — but the best 
idea is only the shadow of a large mind. 
It is at best but a dead thought sepul- 
chered on the white parchment or in the 
folds of the shut and shelved classic. If 
you would make these dead your liv- 
ing thoughts, roll away the stone from 
this shelved sepulcher, breathe the breath 
of a human soul into the lifeless trunks, 
and they are yours to love, honor and 
companion you forever. 

So that the profoundest thinker but 
casts a large shadow upon your path, bid- 
ding you reanimate with an individual 
spirit that which he proffers you. It is 
the power of proving to us what lies in 
our own hearts that makes Shakespeare 
great. We are dead to ourselves till a 
spirit siezes us, pointing to us wonders 
that we dreamed not of — pointing to the 
wonders that lie in our own hearts hith- 
erto undiscovered. It is by proving us 



The Ephemeris of Nature 119 

so great that men are esteemed for their 
greatness. Whosoever shall snatch a 
bright blazing meteor out of the stub- 
born depths of my soul, that man has be- 
come my benefactor — my king. I shall 
honor that man with a devotion sure and 
simple as it is pure and exalted ; I shall 
follow that spirit through all eternity to 
do him service. He has taught me the 
solemnity of an oath, the dignity of a 
purpose, — taught me that truth is not a 
thing abstract and removed, too much of 
divinity to be one with the heart of man ; 
but a living, compelling, surmounting 
god whose province is the hero's own 
soul, whose seal of sovereignty is his own 
oath to high purpose, whose words are 
his oracles, whose sorrow is his sorrow, 
whose triumph, his triumph. The great- 
est truth, O Daemon, is that which proves 
man that truth. 

Nature as Socrates saw it will not suf- 
fice me for nature as it is beholden in 
my eyes. It is a mere phantom — an illu- 
sion in the sight of this great throbbing- 
hearted To-day. What ! Daemon ; can 



Solitarius to his Damon 



Nature then be bound up in the parch- 
ment coffers of a relegated age for two 
thousand solemn and unlettered years? 
The living Ephemeris is the unwritten 
gospel. Nature will not consent to lie 
down in the damp of tombs with her 
most trusted and reverenced lover, inter- 
preter and king. She exalts him, com- 
forts him, honors him ; but she survives 
him, and setting up a fit shrine in the 
midst of applauding men, gives him a 
parting blessing, and seeks another. Now 
a poet, now a painter, now an astrono- 
mer, now an anatomist, — each in his turn 
her best beloved, for whom she bares the 
secrets of her bosom as if he were the 
chosen one of all her eternity of prophet- 
searching, and for whom she flatters the 
beholding world she mourns when the 
hour of parting is come. She hails the 
birth of her prophet with ten thousand 
trumpets, signalizes her esteem with an 
eloquent exordium, and follows with the 
most humbled the train of sackcloth and 
ashes when the great spirit ascends. 
Nature bids us learn the methods of all 



The Ephemeris of Nature 121 

men in their approaching the truth, con- 
struct our own methods therefrom, and 
and then fortified by a reserve efficiency 
and emboldened by a conscious realiza- 
tion of the supremacy of will over every 
authoritative condition, seek the true for 
its own sake with a distinct and individ- 
ual heart. She would not that we seek 
the dead truth for its mere revivifying in 
the risen man — that truth which some 
searcher before us has left stumbling in 
our highway ; but a living, companion- 
ing, interfulgent truth shining between 
the darkened steeps of error-bound mor- 
tality — a truth that respects the man for 
the dignity of his approach and the inter- 
cipient resolve that will not be crushed 
of men's indifference or hate — truth that 
beholds the man and denies him not be- 
fore gods or men. 

Wisdom, as set forth in the gospel 
Ephemeris, is the power of believing so 
truly in the divine adjustment of things 
temporal that this assuring faith would 
conceal and ignore, rather than parade 
and magnify, any taint or deflection, till 



Solitarius to his Dcemon 



the object contemplated stands pure and 
regenerate in that the eyes of the believ- 
er are pure. The inscrutable faith of the 
man in the fidelity of a virtue should sur- 
vive all apparitions of evil behind it. A 
thought that demands the adjunct of a 
dead fact to prop it up in the eyes of the 
beholding, is unworthy the condition it 
aspires to. Enthusiasm which appeals 
to the true through any perfectible me- 
dium should fold the heart so completely 
within its own exalted sense that in the 
refulgent noonday of its own lamp it can- 
not conceive of darkness nor of any deed 
confederate with it. The moral nature 
will not lay bare like a wanton caprice 
the secrets of its holy ministry, nor to 
profane eyes become an evidence of the 
perfection or retrogression of a race or of 
an era. The deeps of a human heart 
cannot be sounded with a yard-stick ; the 
will, O Daemon, is not to be narrowed in 
its prerogatives by the mean possibilites 
of a whole nation of the merely active to 
to selfish ends. Who, O Daemon, would 
with the thin thread of our three score 



The Ephemeris of Nature 123 

and ten proscribed and prejudged years 
to measure eternity ? We cannot look 
into the thinker's eyes and behold eter- 
nity, or see nature robbed of formalities 
— stripped of all courtly and distancing 
ambiguities : nay, Daemon, rather must 
we stand on the other side of the eyes. 
We must renounce our servile allegiance 
to our betters, taking to heart some an- 
cient spirit with an individual grace, and 
minting it into some acceptable currency. 
To this native intuition nothing is a 
sealed book which any genius before the 
advent of this has opened, or any extra- 
neous force of nature has given an age 
to consider or race to respect, and the 
man behind this intuition shrinks not to 
be beholden to them all. The intuitions 
alone are safe. The intuitions find the 
heart of man ever in a state of resilient 
conception — of being born again and 
again as the spirit of change and growth 
widen and catholicize the judgment, and 
as concentrate the principles that govern 
human action. The intuitions assume 
man to be the direct attribute of all that 



124 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

prompts a spiritual resource within him, 
and it is from that world of feeling em- 
bodied as it may be perhaps in a single 
flower, a star, a hope, a beatitude on the 
lips of a child, or a lifting of ignorance 
from its dead and buried self — from that 
world all passion to holy achievement, all 
prophecy, single-mindedness and faith, 
he commands his images, and from the 
reflected fulness of a great spirit dares 
speak. 

Circumstances, by a law of negative 
necessity, are subjective to the achieve- 
ments of men. Man makes republics 
and states, establishes autocracies of sci- 
ence and arts, of conquest and wealth, or 
on the westward hurry of things progress- 
ive, lifts temples to new temporal gods 
through every enlightened season. Men 
make playthings for revolution ; tempt 
the laws of downfall and disaster, found- 
ing schools for the discipline of the low- 
born ; but there their dominion ends. 
All advancement beyond that line means 
the subversion of all before it. Circum- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 125 

stances are the afterlings of great deeds, 
and do not herald them. Socrates and 
Hafiz, Martial, St. Beuve, were creators 
in the common acceptation of that sup- 
ple term ; but they were only creators of 
certain schools of circumstance which in 
turn became a leverage upon current af- 
fairs. But as creators of anything new 
under the sun, even these were not. We 
should place an aureole of living opti- 
mism about the forehead of every man 
that is daring for the good of men what 
the greater than he in worldly preroga- 
tive dares not. Hero that he is, he is 
more ; prophet that he is, he is more ; 
poet that he is, he is more : he is Man. 
Our religions fall ; our creeds, sciences 
and uncatalogued arts, give way to pro- 
gress till the sworn faiths of yesterday 
are obsolete by a thousand years ; but 
still beyond, beneath and superior to all, 
the man remains. Out of the province 
of words, into the realm of inspired 
silence ; out of the province of thought, 
into the realm of sympathy ; out of the 
province of reason, into the realm of faith 



126 Solitarius to his Damon 

and devotion to the art that is his inter- 
preter : so proceeds the Godward, super- 
natant and believing man. Only a faith 
creates ; all other absolutism, all powers, 
and qualities that would exact such rig- 
orous penalties of Nature by force, as if 
she were a felon instead of a triumphant 
bounty-giver, in order that she answer 
the presuming cry of the sceptic and the 
prayer of the rational believer with one 
answering, — these at best combine, as- 
similate and combine again, on into in- 
finitude. Labor alone, no matter how 
severely concentrative, how vigorously 
exact or courageously sacrificing, never 
did an inspired deed. Genius alone, with- 
out this giant's aptitude for labor coupled 
with an integrity of purpose which will 
not count failure as defeat, much less. 
Both, however, even with the soui an 
atom it comparison with the physical 
efficiency, — labor with one giant Idea to 
contain and edify the man, and lo ! the 
bejewelled secrets of which Nature is so 
proudly sparing, pour into the fervent, 
outstretched palms of the believer in an- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 127 

swer to his pleading. Nature flies to the 
threshold of the heart when the cry of 
the great emancipated spirit is heard 
through the solid darkness, — flies thither, 
and then most calmly enters. The trees 
and flowers, the seas and firmament, the 
deed prompted of a brave thought, and 
the consciousness of the presence of truth 
in our very commonplace midst — aye, 
Daemon, have these not tongues where 
sit the oracles discoursing beatitude long 
after the richest words have died on the 
philosopher's lips or the poet's passion ? 
Does not Truth take up her greatest em- 
pire in the wake of great words, — in the 
after-peal of Jove's thunders — in the 
aftermath of the battle-field whereon 
were enacted dramas audienced of ap- 
plauding centuries ? Nature grows most 
eloquent when the lips of wailing and of 
plaudits are stilled; when the paeans are 
drowned down in the hum of resumed in- 
dustries ; when the mourning chaunt has 
died on the darkness and calm that fol- 
lows hard in the footsteps of death. 
Truth heralds the achievements and re- 






128 Sotitarius to his Daemon 

nown of the great soul, then follows king- 
wise in the wake of them with her high- 
est ministrations, her choicest apothegms, 
her most constant fidelities. 

Some minds resemble the prairies : 
vast levels without rise or fall, only 
bisected here and there by a sluggish 
stream, perhaps, but withal fertile, bread- 
giving, blood-giving, bone-giving — a na- 
ture all vitality of use. Another soul 
like the great mid-Alpine convulsions of 
Nature : of vast heights, unfathomable 
depths, wild, gorgeous, chaotic, sublime. 
No bread grows there ; but there is that 
which feeds the heart of man and of 
angels with a life-giving, soul-building, 
thought-compelling manna. It is in the 
crucible of nature that men are tried and 
found wanting or worthy. 

Is consciousness then the only criterian 
of proof to the fact that we live ? Can- 
not we die and still exist — burn out like 
the dead volcanoes on the moon, expired 
but still beholden to a race of beings be- 
yond us ? Why live out the pessimist's 



The Ephemeris of Nature 129 

creed with all these heart-enduing days 
Fridays instead of warm, God-breathing 
Sabbaths full of sweet consecrations and 
brave labors in spheres which know no 
middle distances ? For a million anarch- 
ists, there is but one lifting, edifying, 
emancipating Soul. The world can well 
spare the million to save this one. Only 
to that one are the chimes of life not 
all out of melody, and the sacredest and 
worthiest institutions of this wholesome 
era of progress not all failure and shame. 
To the brave soul alone has the coin of 
our days the ring of genuineness and the 
stamp of republican sovereignty. To 
the brave soul there is a Momus window 
in the bosom of all things that confront 
him — a window into the deeps of the 
second being, that under-current so sub- 
limely removed from the profane touch 
of men — and there finds a nobility worth 
his respect and love. He is great, not 
for his doubt, but for his brave believing. 
He is wise ; but his wisdom is the wis- 
dom of progress by liberalizing and tol- 
erance. He is gifted ; but his talents are 



130 Solitarius to his Dazmon 

the emancipating and the respecting. He 
shrinks from men only to endue them ; 
stands in awe of even his brother lest he 
be misinterpreted of him, — an ignobler 
misfortune than which, cannot befall him. 
His is the philosophy of peace ; not fire, 
and feud, and battling for the sheerest 
animal supremacy. He holds a divine 
confidence in the ultimate perfection of 
the refining arts which it is his challeng- 
ing province to defend. Only such a 
spirit lives ; all others bide by the strict- 
ures of merest existence. He alone may 
say with that virtual assurance of a god, 
'I am!' — all that others can avail is to 
name their prophet and proclaim through 
him, ' We have ! ' 

What a man is, cannot be taken away 
from him : what he has, may be. The 
soul is beyond the finger-marks of evil, 
the impure, the destroying. Death may 
reach out toward it, but it is like the 
man straining to take the sun in his puny 
arms, so safe is the soul beyond the pro- 
fane. The soul, O Daemon, is a frag- 



The Ephemeris of Nature 131 

ment of that Soul whence it emanated ; 
it shall not pass away. 

True enthusiasm acquires a growing 
appetite from that it feeds on. Its proper- 
est food i- never satiating, yet ever com- 
pensating in the highest. The seeker 
after the true in this infinite Ephemeris, 
who by these successive practices of the 
unformulated rites becomes a portion of 
the directest attributes of the infinite, 
so stands a living argument that man 
is but Nature to a surer purpose. 

If we had perfect vision, O Daemon, 
could we not see through eternity ? Can- 
not the perfect touch feel the undulating 
pulse of the very God that sits throned 
upon the bosom of the meanest subject 
of this commonplace condition wherein a 
profound duty has proven itself with 
honor ? Cannot the perfect ear intelli- 
gibly interpret these ' unheard melodies' 
that pierce not the sensual man — this 
nature-reading of the Ephemeris of the 
true and the beautiful whose language is 
the language of transfusion, — the Ian- 



132 Solitarius to his Doemon 

guage of silence, of piety and prophet- 
ism ? Will not the higher man know a 
perfect interpreting medium soul to soul 
— a somewhat of perfect speech and ex- 
actest logic, with perfection in the bal- 
ance of forces and unison of temper? 
Not as now shall he be — one of an in- 
finite family of suns, satellites and peri- 
helions that cluster nightly about the 
wide Hearth of heaven seemingly so near 
one another and apparently mutual in 
thought and in spirit, yet in reality, part- 
ed as the stars, great fathomless abysms 
lying fate-wise betwixt heart and heart — 
the nearest and the dearest. Yet there is 
a privilege left us for which we cease 
not to be grateful : though we under- 
stand not ourselves, much less those about 
us, the God in all things wherever seen, 
heard or felt, is ours to honor, to cherish 
and make glad the hearts of men in our 
own gladness. If we see with but one 
eye, let it be with the eye of a god. If 
we speak but one tongue, let it be the 
language of the poet, the thinker, the 
prophet. If we edify but one talent, let 



The Ephemeris of Nature 133 

it be disciplined to that refined perfection 
that they with ten talents shall marvel at 
our vast leverage upon nature and our 
dominion over things of great price. 
The world has precious need of the one 
developed talent, though it scorns the pre- 
suming genius who boasts the unschooled 
ten. Let the ten talents rust in the cow- 
ard's dead soul ; thy tried and trusted 
one shall rule the world. 



So litude 



There lives a tongueless God in all that feels— 
A silent Christ in every deed of good : 
A beauty but of angels understood, 

And him who valiantly and singly steals 

Upon the hearth of Nature, as reveals 
The cycles of her seasons. Ah, I would 
That through meek Midnight's sunless widowhood, 

Through maiden Morn and gowned Noon, as kneels 

The Persian to the sun, 'twere mine to swear 
Before the watch-fires of my solitude, 

That oath of oaths which only brave men dare — 
The oath of trust, self-faith and fortitude ; 

And with that vow upon me deep and dear, 
So follow on through death the star that I revere. 



Solitude 



137 



SECOND PAPER 



&0liinbs. 



Solitarius affirms «r_ , , , t . , 

that he has found Who would that he were 

in solitude the true 1 ■, A , ^, 

Philosopher's stone brave enough to read the 

that changes to pre- 
cious ore all within 
the Thinker's domin- 
ions. 



cryptograph of a human 
heart? — those mysterious 
pencilings in hot blood-drops, the history 
of lost days and these after-sunsets of joy 
and ambition writ upon the inmost soul, 
beyond the reach of profaning hand or 
prying eyes. There is a tragedy in the 
smile of every man that has passed the 
border-lands of a disproven love, a fallen 
faith, or a misdirected ambition, — a se- 
cret archive where may lie smothered up 
and smouldering in the deepmost soul, 
strange stage-plots and unworded dramas 






138 Solitarius to his Damon 

fit for demigods to act and archangels to 
audience. O good Daemon, who would 
that he were brave enough to steal upon 
these solemn footsteps of Nature through 
all her darkling highways that lead down- 
ward through the city of the soul ? Aye, 
Daemon, there are hearts that know no 
sweet and holy Sabbaths — no fond love's 
holiday which betokens the truth that a 
warm beatitude lives and rules within; 
but which burn, nevertheless, a bright in- 
cense in their laughter and tenderest 
eye-glance which but conceals for a time 
the hideous skeleton behind the emblaz- 
oned altar. Ah, Daemon, what a pathetic 
rite is this ! — what a solemn and mysteri- 
ous ordinance ! 

Every act should have a purifying 
influence upon every other act ; even as 
the lowliest deed may often become the 
holiest by an inspired manner. The labor 
or sentiment that is not worth embodying 
a portion of our very religion within had 
better remain unconceived. It will never 
do more than pretend. There is a child 



Solitude 139 



of greatness in every honest effort — a 
prophecy of success in every brave man's 
failure. Let me be lifted to-day by the 
devout assurances in the honesty of yes- 
terday's failure. A great, good endeavor 
is truer scripture than a thousand little 
deeds which, not serving as stepping- 
stones to a lofty principle, lie flat in the 
dust. Every thoughtful moment is a 
prophet over some hundreds to come ; 
every seeking for the Light is an added 
drop of sacred oil into our dead lamps 
which, when the flame at last descends, 
shall burn like a sun, life-giving through 
all eternity. 

The buy and sell portion of the man 
attains its majority at twenty one ; the 
mind portion rarely before forty. The 
soul remains in virtual infancy, — that is, 
cannot reach its meridian — its full noon 
while yet earth contains it. It must at- 
tain its majority somewhere on the march 
through the vast Beyond. It is the soul 
of a god in habit of a man, and only in 
the empire of divine things sees its full 



140 Solitarius to his Damon 

circle of possibility. True, Chatterton 
at seventeen, Keats at twenty, Alexander 
at twenty four, Burns at twenty six, Cy- 
prian at twenty seven and Schiller at 
twenty nine were full-measured powers ; 
but each had attained his intellectual ma- 
jority rather than the spiritual one. The 
deeds of these were but the fragmentary 
chips fallen to men in the hewing of su- 
perior ideals — as monuments not of a la- 
bor done, but of the sufficiency to that 
which shall be unveiled beyond. 

The great spirit is a thermometer of 
the gods which the ordinary heat of adu- 
lation and the ordinary chill of men's 
contempt upon things which they under- 
stand not, affects not. Only the warmth 
of heaven, the tenderest gradations of 
love, the self-hatred in unfulfilled duty 
and influences universal have any power 
upon this magic mercury ; and as it rises 
and falls, a Truth is gladdened or a Truth 
is saddened. We admire and honor great 
intellectual resource for what it can give; 
we reverence a great soul not for what it 



Solitude 141 



can give, but for what it is and cannot 
give. The soul and intellect often play 
at 'prince and peasant.' The prince, by 
reason of his superior prerogative, has a 
heavier office exacted of him than the 
peasant ; but the peasant's soul often 
puts his foot on the prince's neck. 

Every one that would attain a passport 
into the province of superior things, must, 
like the Truth-devoted Gautama, seek his 
solitary Bo-tree, and leave it not till the 
sublime adeptship be baptised upon him. 
He must turn his waking eyes to the ris- 
ing sun and take oath with the solemn 
abandonment of the man to the religion 
of his art that gave character to the pri- 
meval Brahmin in his Rohiikand jun- 
gle solitudes, — aye, this must he do, and 
well ; or the gods will seal close those 
truth-capable lips with the curse of eter- 
nal silence. Who would be created a 
true nobleman of Nature must stand be- 
fore her as one of a privileged race of 
non-conformists, communioning with her 
in a language beyond tongues, keeping 
up holiest vigils amid the arts beyond all 



142 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

color, music beyond all sound, the sci- 
ences beyond all synthesis, — that silence 
oracular with which Nature is wont to 
discipline into godmost excellence that 
gifted one whose sacrifices have proven 
him of the most reputable quality. He 
must, above and beyond all abject ser- 
vices in the attainment of wisdom, bear 
a soldierly purpose religiously true to 
that self-faith inviolable by the bitterest 
condition. He must become genius, — 
transfused of that supreme quality of the 
gods, spiritually vitalized till the thought 
becomes emancipated from the necessi- 
ties of its material medium — unbound 
of words, unfettered of the flesh, a self- 
knowing, God-knowing, elective revela- 
tion. Feeling is that natively virgin ore 
rarely brought to the surface unalloyed 
with policy or prudery. The trained dip- 
lomat crushes his sympathies as too dan- 
gerously forbearing ; the prude would 
dissemble them lest she be mistaken for 
what she is. The hearts of most feeling 
persons are strata of tragic gold no Eurip- 
ides can mine and beat out into thin 



Solitude 143 



leaves of poetical enchantment to qualify 
the million, nor any profaner genius to 
mint into a commoner coinage for the 
hoarding of coffers or the abuse of usage. 
One heart-throb of sorrow, O Daemon, or 
one fire-light of joy, — may it not steal up 
to heaven and point the hiding-place of 
a most mysterious wealth beneath the 
mountainous heart, that but the very al- 
chemy of eternity — Death, with all his 
dissolving mediums — discloses, qualifies, 
and transmutes into a truth fully intelli- 
gible to mankind ? The moulten gold 
on the heart which now and then at 
rarest intervals oozes a precious drop or 
two into the eloquent speech or more 
eloquent deed, — this the man himself has 
not the power to cool or run into such 
unworthy moulds that the quality be 
changed. It is our chief province to 
search out the most worthy moulds into 
which to run the moulten spirit of which 
the brave heart brims, there to cool into 
solid and tangible forms, — a golden deed, 
a golden word, a golden homily in the 
meanest surviving evidence of a duty 



144 Solitarius to his Daemon 

done where the hero's heart is. 

Nature is constantly putting forth ques- 
tions for our individual answering ; we 
must reply, not with merely a glittering 
collation of substantives and open facts, 
but with nature again as it is within each 
individual possibility, and in so great a 
measure as it is contained by the man, 
and as the man, in turn, is contained by na- 
ture. We dare not be Hegelians in the 
presence of Nature ; we must be think- 
ers. Not mere Platonists ; but reasoners. 
When Nature puts the query, the answer 
must be nature. Another man's answer, 
— even a prophet's or a king's in my 
mouth, will not suffice. The humblest 
painter's native effort is a better answer 
to his Nature's questionings than a most 
skilful pseudo-Raphael. We dare not be 
Buddha's second-thought, nor Mozart's 
second-hearing in this exalted presence ; 
we dare not merely answer question with 
question : we must answer it with man. 
Nature ever demands of us to be nature ; 
then easy indeed becomes it to think na- 
ture, act nature and talk nature, — and be 



Solitude 145 



esteemed poet, prophet, philosopher as 
worthily proves the mood. For 

Who would play well the painter's part, 
Must be — thought, act and feeling — Art. 
Be poet, prophet, king, who can; 
Be manhood first: then be the man. 

Every soul is a concave mirror to 
every other soul, — a sort of reflecting 
telescope most refined and exact, by 
which may be brought nearer earth for 
man's edification, the truths of the God in 
whose image he is. We determine with 
exactness the orbit of our own souls by 
looking into other men's eyes and ways, 
and we wear the record of retrogression 
or advance upon our open brows where 
It may be neither mistaken or gainsaid. 
We approach our own selves in reality 
more than another when we confess for 
the sweet sake of confession some ambi- 
tion, doubt, or faith, thus lighting our- 
selves out of the darkness by lighting 
others. By exhorting are we ourselves 
most exhorted ; by teaching, taught ; and 
by pouring a warm libation of reliance 
and faith into some stranger heart are 
our own right arms stimulated and our 
scepticisms overthrown. 



146 Solitarius to his Damon 

Every man seeks that nature from 
which his own in coming in contact will 
rebound with the strongest resilience. 
Likes rebound upon dislikes ; positive 
upon negative ; the affinity upon its most 
radical opposite. Action equals reaction 
in a contrary direction, — a law of spirit- 
uality as well as of physics. There must 
first be a datum of interest, perhaps, but 
this soon becomes sympathy, and these 
opposite temperaments then find in each 
other a wholesome rebounding place. 
Poets in geometricians, composers in 
logicians, find fast friends when once the 
respect is mutual. Power realizes itself 
only by coming in contact with opposites. 
A lymphatic temperament may with a 
simple touch of the hand, quiet a fever 
in an exquisite, reed-like predominence. 
Love proves itself by crushing hatred ; 
and the good is never so good as face to 
face with evil and a world at stake in the 
balance behind them. 

In your life-work you serve an ap- 
prenticeship of four years and are then 



Solitude 147 



accounted an adept. You can box a 
compass, or set nonpareil, or determine 
ohms resistence, or swing a sythe ; but 
think you the apprenticeships of all men 
are as yours ? Not so. Here is one 
whose three score and ten of labor and 
rigorous self-denial is as a single year of 
your apprenticeship, and even this is 
all Truth exacted of him. He shall not 
attain his adeptship here and he knows 
it well. Are there not other knowledges 
beyond those wondered of men ? — other 
disciplinarians than those of mere want 
and will? — other spheres of power into 
which some poor aspirant of to-day shall 
lift himself after an apprecticeship of 
some thousand years? 'Who was he?' 
is the universal demand. 'The doer of 
a little benefaction ; the writer of a par- 
lor epic ; the preacher of a country flock 
where sufferance is the only homily that 
avails.' 'It is well!' cries Convention. 
1 But who then was this one, to whom all 
men were as strangers ? — to whom the 
most august setting of the temporal man 
— the most propitious robing of our con- 
dition of sorrow with the glamor of sov- 



148 Solitarius to his Damon 

ereignty — was as a fetter and a snare ? — 
who then was he ? ' ' Ah, we knew him 
not;' comes the reply. 'That man, tho* 
one among us, was not one with us. We 
knew his ways, his haunts, his home, his 
properties ; but as for the man, we knew 
him not. He held his face against the 
stars and listened. He questioned the 
forests and the flowers, and even they an- 
swered him. He touched the sea and it 
shuddered. He communed with the dead 
and the yet unborn ; and they called him 
Brother. He dwelt in the ashes of dead em- 
pires, and made playthings of republics yet 
to be. In what the world esteems living, 
his life was a gigantic failure ; yet, in- 
terpreted aright, it was one wide-waging 
inspired and godlikest revelation. These 
three score and ten were as an inch-long 
span in the eternity of that man's labor. 
A hundred years are but the apprentice- 
ship of such a soul, so incomparably vast 
is the circumference of its truth. He was 
too honest in the pursuance of a godlike 
task to be accounted a success according 
to the standards by which men adjudge 



Solitude 149 



men in the superficial arts. What ! would 
you put him to grinding at the Gizan 
mill whose faith and fortitude could 
remove mountains ? Gone then indeed 
is that wide spirit, leaving no finished la- 
bor? — no tangible trace upon the con- 
temporary times that shall conquer man's 
unbelief in man in aught save the deed 
done ? A life lost ? — the God mocked ? 
— a triumph dethroned ? But what know 
you of him then, being so ignorant of his 
very thought ? How call you any man's 
mission save your own, a failure or suc- 
cess ? The soul will not be compelled in- 
to foreign channels : it compels. It 
chooses not : it has but one choice. It 
is its own profession, vocation, avocation, 
and creed. It is its own sanctuary, work- 
shop, altar, and forge. The soul is truth 
discovering itself. 

Such an one then is willing indeed to 
be accounted a failure among men ; yes, 
even an undoer rather than a doer of the 
deeds esteemed of mortals. But he labors 
nobly on, believing in this labor of his 
solitary days, trusting, confiding, faithful 



150 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

to the end. Who dares say such a faith 
shall not be rewarded, and that for the 
labor of so much watching his star shall 
not appear? A religion of expansion, a 
life all consecrate to effort, a reliance in 
the right arm of self — with these serves he 
his bond-slave's probation-time, and then 
— death. What! is this the end of a great 
endeavor ? But the calm answer comes 
over the threshold of heaven : Men, I 
have not lifted you as I endeavored, but 
I shall yet lift angels. My failure of 
earth shall prove a prophecy of my suc- 
cess of heaven. I have done duty to a 
far nobler law than yours. You call me 
' fool :' the gods shall yet call me ' Brother.' 

Our exact nearness or remove from 
the great sun of Truth, the absolute cir- 
cumference of our meridian, and the pos- 
itive and negative values of our celestial 
movements, we determine, in a measure, 
by regarding men and their respect for 
our achievements. The world's eyes are 
telescopes by which we may bring our 
own souls into understanding reach. The 



Solitude 151 



elixir we brew in our bosoms to intoxi- 
cate others, first intoxicates ourselves; 
and in edifying men, we are thrice edi- 
fied. Our honest moments are produc- 
tive of deeds which have a tremendous 
resilience. They come back after a time 
like carrier-pigeons, bearing good cheer 
and blessed tidings from afar. 

The soul, like a vast amphitheatre of 
passions, powers, sacrifices and the ex- 
tremes of feeling, has many entrances ; 
it has but one exit. An idea, a person, 
a beatitude, a trope, — anything indeed of 
fancy or of fact — these may enter solus or 
in companies ; for a season they perform 
their several roles — tragic, comic, pas- 
toral — but there is but a single exit for 
them all. We live out yearly more epics 
of love and heroism than Ovid or Ariosto 
could put to adequate eloquence in a 
century. Our very commonplace days 
are heroic poems in which some love, 
some hope, some daring to be brave and 
beautiful within hath challenged the 
whole history of heaven to overawe. We 



152 Solitarius to his Dcsmon 

are living, God-struck harps, the uncon- 
scious music of which often startles our- 
selves and proves our worthiness. Men 
in their spiritual attitude are a hundred 
removes from men though but one re- 
move from God. The paradox of mere 
season and temperament is irrelevant in 
the truer argument of nature. Some of 
us at birth are plunged into cold oil or 
water, so to speak, and are tempered so 
hard that the smart blow of a common 
circumstance would shatter the brittle, 
unyielding mettle. John Keats and Kirk 
White were of this exquisite fragility ; 
they were only half annealed. Zeno, Ly- 
curgus and Schopenhauer, cooled into 
rugged maturity by slow process ; but 
malleable iron will not do for watch- 
springs. We rise like the Cyprian god- 
dess from the sea of eternity, like unto 
like, power unto power, man unto men ; 
uniformity ends there, and the individu- 
al ascends assuming his prerogative, and 
for the first becomes truth before the 
province he enters, 



Solitude 153 

Every generation produces men with 
a sort of acutely critical instinct toward 
superior things, who collate great factors 
and gather the leading data of some uni- 
versal law, forming a series the unknown 
quantity of which they cannot solve. 
This unknown quantity is the elect prov- 
ince of genius. The former are mere 
mind-readers, fact-readers, nation-read- 
ers ; the letter, mind-makers, fact-makers, 
nation-makers. Both live lives of dual 
personality, one on the surface of his own 
and other minds, the other deep in the 
heart of hearts in the man and nation oi 
men. The intellect has therein but the 
second right to speak ; for in nature the 
soul is king, and in this formal court all 
should be silence when the sovereign 
speaks. 

Truth like the goddesses of the upper 
Thessalian groves, is not to be enchanted 
into a crowd. The Philosopher's stone 
is hers, and by it all is turned to virgin 
gold that she touches and dignifies. We 
are the subjects and yielders, masters be- 
neath mastery, living, breathing truisms 



154 Solitarius to his Daemon 

which have so prime an exercise in the 
fulfilment of her law. This solitude 
performs ; all else deforms. The philos- 
ophy of severe detail is our yoke. The 
pessimisms of the trivial usurping the 
sacredest of soils and making birth worth, 
undoing our profoundest dogmas or oblit- 
erating our formalest beliefs, — these are 
the results of an intemperate herding 
propensity. Truth would redeem us 
from all this, — would drive us into seclu- 
sion, requiring us to think instead of com- 
pelling others to do our thinking for us. 
How shrinks the thinker from the pic- 
ture, the sonnet, the melody, the man, that 
seems to think for him rather than com- 
pelling thought ! When a book does my 
thinking, — when it ceases to demand of 
me to read between the lines for the tru- 
est truth, it is cast aside. The best of 
books are valuable merely for their im- 
mense suggestiveness. Only to a poet is 
true poetry intelligible. The thinker 
speaks only to thinkers ; the philosopher 
has no audience save those whom nature 
has endowed with that same spirit in a 



Solitude 155 



greater or less degree. There should 
stand an invisible yet evident prophet of 
divinity between every written couplet ; 
else what purports to be truth is trivial 
and unworthy. 

But nothing is rarer than the soli- 
tary non-conformist, as nothing indeed 
is so rare — considering that w T e cannot for 
a moment cease thinking — as pure, re- 
fined and direct thought. The thinker 
is a sovereign anomaly. He must stand 
without the circle, a unit one and apart, 
and be no book's, no creed's, no system's, 
parasite. These cannot contain him ; 
he contains them and more, or the truth 
is forever denied him. If a god offered 
to do his thinking for him, he would 
shun him when the time came. He with- 
in whom truth abides, will not exchange 
his humble moments for an angel's. His 
thoughts are his own, his labor distinct, 
his influences individual, his duty ful- 
filled : his heaven. Though they may be 
but the thoughts of a child compared 
With a god's, they are wholly his ; and 



156 Solitarius to his .Dcemon 

from thence he aspires upward. Nature 
esteems the thinker. His quest is an- 
swered in solitude where that still, small 
voice of inspiration is magnified like a 
watchman's far cry at midnight. The 
world without is deaf, dead, and so re- 
wardless. 

By solitude Creation first gave oath. 
By divine laws of removal alone the 
clouds hold their lightnings and the stars 
their orbits. The cry of the intellect to- 
day is ten fold bitterer than in that sunk- 
en era of Erasmus and Chrysostom : — 
' More Light ! more time ! ' — for this is a 
century of absorption in the dismembered 
details of all arts and religions, — the 
wrenching of vast units into their infin- 
ite factors, making a deity of each defin- 
itive molecule or atom. The larger faith's 
prayer is no longer heard, — that prayer 
to be delivered from this Philistine yoke 
of the superficial, — from this slavery to 
the extrinsic little ; the prayer for soli- 
tude with its wide, non-adjacent circum- 
ferences and nobler theorems for the 



Solitude 157 



man's solution ; the prayer to be delivered 
from these distracting loadstones of the 
trivial which gather such huge bulks of 
refuse fact and relegated superstition in 
the upward highways of the constant 
soul. Alhazen discovered the terrestrial 
law of gravitation. Newton discovered 
this law to be a celestial one, — an appli- 
cation profounder than the discovery. 
He applied a large law to a larger use. 
Such was the tendency and fruit of the 
solitary age. We would have applied 
that Arab's law to the heart of a spider 
rather than a planet. Such is the ten- 
dency of the social age ; such is the 
mood of the critical, the statistical, the 
levelling, and the essentially material era. 
And, too, O Daemon, believ'st not 
that there is many a soul of profound 
and sterling resource withering away in 
a garret, whom God's honest sunshine 
bronzing his pale brows would soon prove 
a veritable god in the ragged habit of a 
mendicant? The soul cannot see by 
candle-light ; the great summer noonday 
sun is barely lamp enough. The social 



158 Solitarius to his Damon 

scriptures as written on the forehead of 
the contemporary times is lighted up by 
galvanic flash-lights, artificial glamors, 
and flattering aureolas, hot, passionful, 
fleshy. But by these, O Daemon, has yet 
one solitary soul been lighted out of the 
darkness of his own perturbing igno- 
rance and folly ? Light thy lamp in the 
forest, in the vales, on the mountain tops, 
and here return to give light. The cities 
with their crowds and turmoils, — these 
know no days ; they are at best but neb- 
ular daybreaks melting into solemn twi- 
lights without a noon. The zenith is ob- 
scured, the sun in the sackcloth and ashes 
of a seemingly universal penance-time, 
the heart of man estranged, his footstep 
bold in its suffering uncertainty. The 
real noon by which Nature and the throb- 
bing heart of man lay bare their holiest 
oracles, — Truth beholden to her truer 
self, and the man at last proven superior 
to all mortality — this divine, thought- 
ripening, faith-ripening, soul-ripening, 
noontide is to be found only in the re- 
poseful fields and patriarchal woods, un- 



Solitude 159 



der the unclouded, quiet, God-blessed 
skies. Only in the dream-maturing soli- 
tudes does the great sun bear a mother's 
warmth in the confiding embrace of its 
radiance and peace. Everywhere else, 
good Doemon, it serves as mere commer- 
cial food and marketable convenience, to 
be bought and sold, and held in bondage 
or monopoly. 

It is by keeping their eyes perpetu- 
ally upon the ground that makes men 
crawl. There have been but a few in 
chains that have kept their eyes on the 
full, free heavens ; but even these were 
martyred for the courage. Were we not 
lifted off four legs and set upon two 
that we might look the clear, blue heav- 
ens squarer in the face ? Only the 
brute's head hangs coward from the 
trunk ; the man's surmounts it. Nature's 
first law is rotation. She revolves, but 
the centre ever remains the same. She 
casts aside whatever impedes her pro- 
gress, even as a great spirit the nice dis- 
tinctions of the small casuist, remedies 



160 Solitarius to his D anion 

all her diseases of stagnation with a 
sweeping arm of conquest, and proceeds 
without a halt. Greater questions of 
right and wrong are answered by the ad- 
vancing deeds of great and nobly-pur- 
posed men than by the winnowing sub- 
tilties of the exact casuist. Mankind has 
ever been entranced by the spell of a 
great action. The man of deeds does not 
expound nor theorize upon the nature of 
evil : he crushes it. 'Can you solve this 
problem?' demands the casuist. 'No; 
but while you have been vainly striving 
toward an impossible point, I have ac- 
complished ten good deeds for the better- 
ing of men.' Who cannot expound the 
metaphysics of right and wrong may 
still be able to purge and purify a whole 
devils' household. He may pry apart the 
ribs of a fallacy and let the light of heav- 
en into the deeps of hell till a thousand 
fiends are vanquished. Tell me? hast 
done one good deed amid all thy thun- 
derings through the darkness for the 
light which dawns not ? 



Solitude 161 



The ancients found the venerable 
woods and patriarchal mountains enjoy- 
ing a perpetual youth. No manifesta- 
tion of the unseen God in the beautiful 
and true could seem to them antiquated 
scripture. It was essentially of to-day. 
No truth was old, even if the oracle had 
waited ten thousand years for its inter- 
preter. Cannot they of prophet's know- 
ing behold an ocean in a rain-drop ? see 
in the babe's clear eyes a God ? ' Mission' 
is the watchword of the soul. It is writ- 
ten in blood-drops on the forehead of the 
man. The religion that teaches it not, 
the philosophy that implies it not, the 
science that commands it not, is dross 
and corruption. No man with his mission 
unperformed has a right to seek content. 
For with mind comes power ; with power, 
care ; with care, virility. But death with 
the mission implied in our birth well 
performed, is far better than life for the 
living's sake. 

Men compute life upon their fingers. 
They say such and such a candle will 
burn out in so many days or years, con- 






162 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

ceiving not that from time incomputable 
it has been lighted, and to time incom- 
putable it shall so remain. The soul is 
a torch lighted at the beginning ; it shall 
not cease. It passes through dark and 
uncertain passage-ways, strange and illim- 
table chambers of eternity, one of which 
we please to call 'life,' but it passes out 
again, and lights up another dark avenue 
of the great Beyond. Here then have we 
entered merely an obscure portico of the 
temple of divine things. We advance 
through the darkness toward the superior. 
Man is but a portal-way to the higher 
man ; death but the threshold into an- 
other chamber where the God in ail 
things of beauty and of truth is more 
manifest and assured. Then let us hold 
our torches high ; for it is the province 
and duty of every soul to cast a radiant 
and enlarging influence upon its contem- 
poraries and so be proved worthy. 

How mere mortality shrinks back to 
its handful of dust at the naming of its 
God ! How the span of our imperious 
three score shrivels to a mote, the eulo- 



Solitude 1 6$ 



giums of a million dead to a tear-drop, 
and the deeds of the least and best as if 
recorded on the inner walls of a mustard 
seed when the name of Truth is let fall 
from the mouth of universal space, and 
all is silence. Arise ! arise ! and prove 
your birthright true. This then is the 
voice of the eternal. We want no depth 
of abstract knowledge, no vast experi- 
ances, no bizarre formulas, nor need we 
pose as heroes of a hundred wars, nor 
princes of a hundred empires of fact or 
of fortune, to know our honest duty. 
Only duty dares ; all else dreams about 
it. The undevout and witted utilitarian, 
all sensuality, all egoism, at best is but a 
harper upon that inefficient, devil's doc- 
trine of use. The man of duty is a crier 
down of abuse and is the larger man. 
Use is the watchword of Nature's hus- 
bandry, and all her constituents serve a 
vast and multitudinous office ; but Na- 
ture was feeling before she was fact ; 
first sympathy, then synthesis ; a revela- 
tion before a concrete factor. The soul 
shall not be eclipsed by the presumption 



164 Solitarius to his Damon 

of temporal things, nor shall it be hid be- 
neath the silver circumference of a dollar 
or its purchase. It shall not be disenti- 
tled by monetary nor factional presum- 
ing. Arise ! young soul, or be forever 
fallen. 

Every man has a mountain pinnacle 
over his very heart, upon which at cer- 
tain exalted intervals and by proving 
himself worthy, it is his divine privilege 
to ascend and to survey whatever the 
best of the present or past have beheld 
and for man's edification interpreted. 
There alone may he cry his 'open sesame' 
to the closed portals of the infinite, and 
see the gates where have entered seers 
and patriarchs before him, parted to hi- 
desire. He may there perfect for him- 
self a complete individual microcosm of 
which he is soul and centre, and may ad- 
just all distances to his own spiritual fo- 
cus. No man sees the same rainbow 
that his brother at his side sees. There 
is an individual rainbow for every eye 
that beholds and respects it, The truths 



Solitude 165 



that found in Socrates a new interpreter, 
find that same in you. Your rainbow is 
as full of the godlike as the Magian's. 
With the advent of every man there is a 
new nature, new universe, new God. 
Who dares say that Plato's rainbow out- 
shone yours ? If you cannot behold his, 
neither can he yours. Thoughts under- 
go a continual metamorphosis from 
climate to climate, from plain to plain 
and age to age. The oriental proverb 
finds its way into the heart and out of the 
rugged mouth of the Nevada miner. The 
Icelander's metaphors traverse the trop- 
ics, having exchanged its garb of ice for 
a garland of flowers. I own a grand debt 
to Alhazan ; but he in turn owes it to 
Euripides ; and he to Zoroaster ; and 
this Persian to She-king ; and this Chi- 
naman to another perhaps. We must go 
back to the Pleistocene age to render 
thanks for some of our thoughts. But 
by its birth in your heart and my heart 
every ennobling impulse become new, 
and the embodied God whence it pro- 
ceeds becomes a new and a personal deity 



1 66 Solitarius to his Damon 

for the quickening of the dead and corrupt- 
ible flesh. So is it that for my thoughts 
I owe no man a greater debt than he owes 
some one else, and the last mind of the 
infinite series must pay it back to Nature 
with all the accumulated usury. 

Every good is prolific of that same. 
Truth cannot remain sterile, for what- 
ever attitude or assumption it may take 
it is ever and forever a repetend of that 
same throughout eternity. There is no 
hybrid truth in God's ethics. From the 
seed beatitude comes forth the tree beat- 
itude, whether reared in the social circle 
or in the hermit's solitude, so long as it is 
over the cradle of some righteous en- 
deavor. A single word may herald an 
army of ideas ; a single deed a multitude 
of reforms ; a thought a hundred data ; 
a datum a philosophy. Everything of 
action is the centre of a tremendous in- 
tellectual and spiritual area. From each 
portion of nature active, radii extend in- 
finitely through every other throughout 
the series ; the circumference is God, its 



Solitude 167 



centre is the true. As a good is procrea- 
tive so is it worthy, and only so. Even the 
gods prove themselves by constant con- 
quest. 

And there are a few questions which, 
by whatsoever lamp of reason or ignis 
fatuus of blind presumption we read the 
history of the human heart, present them- 
selves for our individual solving, and 
from which there is no trapway of escape 
nor brother's shoulder at hand whereon 
they may be shifted. Whether w T e will 
or not, problems which unbody the spirit 
and embody a portion of the eternal, 
questions of the aye and nay of the fu- 
ture, of soul and idea, thrust themselves 
upon us, which shall either on this or 
the other brim of that disillusioning cup, 
be answered once and forever. The lapses 
of the indolent, the lost days, the unre- 
plenished years swallowed up in the soph, 
ist's empiricism and sufficiency — these are 
the devil's sabbaths — the dabbler's holi- 
days. Every ignoble thought displaces 
a hundred noble ones. With the advent, 
too, of every virtue on the darkened 



1 68 Solitarius to his Damon 

heart, a hundred fiends are vanquished. 
Truths are compact ; a hundred may- 
crowd down in one corner of the heart 
where a single lie will displace it. The 
false must need inflate itself ; a single 
unworthy ambition will distend itself 
till it fills with corruption the space of 
many a godly, sober aspiration. Every 
poor article like every poor thought, 
crowds down a worthy one. A bad 
painting unfit for the altars of Baal, 
crowds down a noble work of art worthy 
the shrine of Vesta. The curse of honest 
art, honest science, honest religion, is 
dilettanteism — this pastime art, this pas- 
time writing of books, pastime besmat- 
tering of dignified music, pastime relig- 
ion and the forcing insincerities — all of 
which raises the dusts of damnation in 
the eyes of that brave believer who lays 
down his life that the purpose of his 
heart and the labor of his hand may live 
to honor and edify mankind. The dab- 
bler must be suppressed ; the trifler must 
cease. There is but one true inspiration 
to true and exalted labor ; duty toward 



Solitude 169 



others. The gratification of a vanity, de- 
sire to awe, the time-killing quality, — 
these can but babble ; the exercise of 
these marks the decay of the sublime. 
But the sublime shall not die so long as 
the heart of man is moved to nobler 
things by the power of pen, or brush, or 
harpstring, — stirred more profoundly to 
braver action than by the influence of 
purse or the brutalities of sword and 
violence. There are unmistakable evi- 
dences of sincerity in the crudest prod- 
ucts of the honest heart. They cannot be 
mistaken nor gainsaid. But the disen- 
titled harlequin, — the usurping trifler 
who presumes upon the birthright of 
worthier men, who steals into the arena 
masked in illusion and armed with a 
trumpet to capture by fright the lion he 
dare not face with a bare bosom and a 
sword — this one shall not maintain. 

'Who then shall we encourage?' is 
the common query. The sincere man 
and only him. Whatever the failures of 
the sincere man, he should be devoutly 
encouraged, and for his valiance hon- 



170 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

ored. He has not his eyes upon the 
achievement of to-day ; it is the deed 
that it heralds — the deed of twenty years 
hence, toward which this one serves as 
a meek stepping-stone. If he be faith- 
ful to his purpose, constant to the God 
of that enthusiasm which proves him 
chosen to the fulfilment of that devout 
ideal, whatever his errors, whatever his 
failures, he is a rare man ; for selfishness 
is not in him, and such an one is a giant 
factor for the good in this era of doubt 
and duplicity that maintains with the 
heathen gods: 'Self is the God of self.' 
He alone is master, republican, king ; 
and what is greater than saint, seer, or 
sovereign — a man. 

When that one of large and exact 
ideals shall have passed the climax of 
his art, then and then only shall he covet 
and seek the judgments of men. Then 
will the opinions of critics appear of true 
gravity ; then will it be fatal to know and 
realize one's life-labor lost. Now while 
he is but a child in his art and the man's 
strong heart as yet only lisps and mur- 



Solitude 171 



murs, all the strictures and carping of 
Christendom shall sound but as malicious 
prattle in his ears. They only prod him 
on who damn him. They only wrap him 
closer within himself, only prove solitude 
more worthy him, his faith more assured, 
his purpose more consecrate. But one 
day shall this child wield the sword of a 
man, preach the art of a man, dream the 
dreams of a man, and do the deeds of a 
man. Then shall the honest critic's 
words sound like oracles and serve as 
dial-hands pointing to the truth, fixing 
his place among heroes and so exalting 
him, or proving upon his helpless, aban- 
doned soul the hell of a labor lost. 

The greater the reach and circumfer- 
ence of the soul, the longer it requires 
to discover, and in its full province, real- 
ize itself. Men are ever judged at their 
best. Mediocrity is the callous grown like 
a devil's armor round the heart, impene- 
trable to any lifting enthusiasms. It is 
the smoked glass before the inner, surer 
sight — the ball and chain which would 



172 Solitarius to his Damon 

keep the unit within the multiplicity, the 
smothering of the divine spark in the 
ashes of other's failure and other's con- 
tempt. Mediocrity is the warmth of the 
great sun swollowed up in the universal 
chill; the divine union — that pearl of 
great price — dropped into the diluting 
liquor of society and thus can be poured 
from place to place, receptacle to recep- 
tacle, nationality to nationality as pleases 
the. giant hybrid of convention. Why 
will we not labor on with God and duty 
in the foreground and men in the dis- 
tance, instead of men in the foreground, 
God set aside in the farthermost, and 
selfism the lamp of our progress ? Why 
demand we to feel the breath and touch 
of something tangible upon our cheeks 
ere we believe ? We are dilutions, not 
concentrations ; we are fractions, not 
integers ; we are mere automatons, not 
men. What then is the final recompense? 
Self-ostracism from the city of our spirit- 
ual birth ; a hatred of our own thought ; 
a fear of solitude and abandonment to 
this acute malady which springs from 



Solitude 173 



over-consociality ; a chimera eclipsing a 
certitude, and a hanging upon the lips of 
the profane oracle though we hang by 
the neck and perish. 

Who then is brave enough to inter- 
pret the divine apothegm of Truth as 
it is writ on the foreheads of man and 
nature in this era of wit-worship, super- 
ficiality, irreverence and caprice ? Who 
will stand forth and emancipate the heart 
from its bonded restringency ? — pay off 
the soul's debt with a soul and let hu- 
manity pay God with humanity? That 
man shall be the first freedman of the era. 
He shall herald a new faith in things un- 
seen ; a monitor of the feeling and the 
felt rather than a demander of analysis and 
mere fact-values ; a philosopher of the 
heart rather than the mind, — the first re- 
posing place of all our whirlwind ethics 
in this mad reign of flesh and material- 
ity. He will speak and be heard when 
all others shall remain silent. The world 
and its lovers cannot crush nor conceal 
such an one ; he will stand up and do. 



174 Solitarius to his Damon 

The silent man is a parenthetical clause 
in the histories of men and action. He 
is a relic of a forgotten, gainless era, 
— the phantom of a dead and buried race. 
He is a mere automaton of digestion 
which does not produce vitality, blood, 
sinew and thought. He dips his pen in 
the dews and his little oracle fades away 
when the sun rises. The silent man — 
and by him is meant the cow 7 ard tongue- 
less of deed or word — is not a forcer of 
the tide of affairs, but is headlong afloat 
upon it like a carrion hulk, — a piece of 
human driftwood cast from the eminence 
it Was found so unworthy to maintain ; 
when he ceases, the tide flows on without 
him. The curse of curses is : to be for- 
gotten ; but only the coward is forgotten. 
He forgot others while he lived ; they 
forgot him when the grave stands be- 
tween. And this is just ; this is compen- 
satory. Would the man who had done 
the dog's labor demand more than the 
dog's price ? What dog would ask a 
man's? — and yet cowards there are who 



Solitude 175 



demand the reward of a god for the work 
of a fool. 

Then who ascends not, descends ; 
who aspires not, retires ; and better so. 
Let him not clog the narrow ways, rais- 
ing dust in the eyes of honester, soberer 
men, and so adding crime to cowardice. 
The heart of man to-day so free of action 
and purpose, to-morrow will be smoth- 
ered up by the narrowness of its prison- 
house. Evolution and progression there- 
in are the end of a beginning ; but 
silence and mediocrity, the beginning of 
the end. 

We are permitted to stand in rela- 
tion to nature even on the footholds of 
angels, though their radii overlap ours 
a thousand fold. Even so we may to- 
day mount the Rostra Julia, though our 
Rome be not Cicero's Rome, nor our el- 
oquence Cicero's eloquence. We may 
walk the porticos of Athens, or discourse 
logic from the steps of the Parthenon, 
even though our wit match not Aris- 



176 Solitarius to his Damon 

totle's, nor our rhapsody challenge that 
of ^Eschylus. The Cumsean oracle, the 
court of Hypatia, the hearthstone of Lati- 
mer, the lamp and tower of Galileo, the 
cloak of John Knox, — these are emi- 
nences where we may gather a world as 
audience still, even though our words be 
not their words ; for the spirit remains, 
and the habit and sceptre of their state 
descend in heritage awaiting the worthy 
one. We may stand on the identical 
centre of the circles of the greatest and 
least, though the common eye looks in 
vain into the dim distance to descry a 
star, and seine all its little eternity for a 
new law or principle. The centre is ours 
though our horizons be as the sailor's at 
sea — only nineteen miles — while theirs 
is incommensurable. 

Mere mind has but the preserving 
power ; not the spontaneous, not the dif- 
fusing. Only the soul when a noble qual- 
ity has proceeded from it, may feel as 
felt the Christ when he perceived that a 
virtue had passed forth from him with 



Solitude 177 



the touch of a woman's hand at the hem 
of his garment. Every good must feel 
something of a maternal love ere it has 
half fulfilled its mission, — must see a 
whole household of its own clustered 
confidingly about it, the grateful offspring 
of its nature — its own flesh, blood, and 
nobility. To the realizing eye the whole 
commandant heavens are tapestried like 
a Parsee temple, in the solemn nave of 
which stands the font of eternal fire — 
that calm beacon of Truth imperishable 
— and around it cluster all the priests 
and laymen of nature in attitudes of rev- 
erence and silent, unutterable prayer. 

Every heart, O Daemon, like the old 
Puritan churches, has a door at the North 
end marked, "For Devils Only!" The 
bright sun never shines there, nor over 
its threshold does ever a pure thought 
presume to trespass. Ah, what a tragic 
and solemn little portal is this, in many 
a heart sealed and barred forever, and in 
many a heart kept swinging to and fro, 
in response to many exits and many en- 



178 Solitarius to his Damon 

trances, — aye, mayhap barely hanging 
by the worn and rusty hinges, soon to 
fall to the ground and rot, leaving an 
ugly black gap on the heart where the 
now familiar fiends may pass confidently 
in and out without even the formality of 
a knock. And, O Daemon, do not they 
that enter at that hidden door often bring 
the costliest offerings to the altar-place 
of Truth, singing the loudest paeans, pro- 
claiming their wrongs and suffrages in 
the most eloquent prayers, aweing the 
prostrate world, though that calm and 
imperturbable goddess interprets well ? 
Truth knows tha bribe of plumed pre- 
sumption from the holy mite of the calm, 
heroic, God-appealing endeavor. Poor 
old Miles Coverdale maintained with a 
vigor deliciously redolent with the spirit 
of those credent times, that men who die 
with their faces to the North, shall rise in 
darkness ; while those that die facing the 
South shall rise in light. Poor heavens 
at best are those that man would reward 
his fellow-elect in recompense for the 
ache and moil of his faithful years. But 



Solitude 179 



man's North may yet prove to be Nature's 
South : the curst of men, the elect of 
the gods. Who can point the North 
as it appears from heaven ? Who pre- 
sumes to take upon him the task of 
pointing out in the million, the man ? 
Fool is he that would judge any honest 
and obedient purpose. May not the de- 
spised of men, O Daemon, yet prove him- 
self the one chosen of Truth ? May not 
this negative rise and proclaim itself a 
positive ? — this denial, an approval ? — 
this repudiation of mankind, a pred- 
ication of angels ? He whose confident 
heart brims with humanity, O Daemon, 
are not his merest intuitions profounder 
far than creed, sect, or philosophy ? The 
world's darkness may be nature's noon, 
even though the heart of man be es- 
tranged beyond the obedient and supple 
present ; even as the night to me may be 
the light to him that comes forth from 
deeper darkness. 

But neither nature, nor any of her 
true-born and loyal disciples, can be 
taught by any medium of dispassioning 



180 Solitarius to his Damon 

or disillusioning logic that whatever is, 
is darkness — that whatever is, is wrong. 
Truth comes forth from the farthermost 
estrangements pointing out to men those 
vast libraries and modern archives re- 
plete and bounteous with the beautiful 
and true, and shrinks not to meet the 
man on his own little plane of introspec- 
tion and sentiment. These vast libraries 
with shelf upon shelf from nadir to the 
zenith are beyond the touch of triflers : 
these ten thousand stare at the titles and 
many colored backs, wondering what 
profundity lies embalmed within each 
imperishable chronicle ; only one of all 
these vast armies who but contemplate 
the radiant exteriors, ventures to put 
forth his hand and make the oracle of a 
single secret of Nature his own. But one 
of all these ten thousand makes brave to 
open, invoke, learn, love, honor, and 
abide within the ripening spirit of one 
written aphorism of Nature, and there lay 
down his life trustfully, believingly. So 
is it that men often misinterpret and 
condemn that which, though they know 



Solitude 181 



it not, is one of a wide brotherhood of 
power and perfectible motive for the 
betterment of ill-sacrificed condition, and 
the lifting of human perversity from its 
vile habitude of error and crime. 

Whenever a new departure in an art 
or science is noted, there seems always 
to arise a complementing personality 
with it, to whom, and to whom only, 
that cherished quality must first have 
confided with all the faith of a scripture 
in its interpreter. A new and abundant 
force in nature, like the Assyrian maiden, 
must wait year after year until he whose 
worth and gallantries, with loadstone at 
the heart and eloquence at the lips, can 
find favor and see the doors parted as to 
a bridegroom and his magnificent train. 
No mere strategist or profane adventurer 
can approach the silent, listening, hope- 
ing spirit without he first be purified and 
made worthy to be admitted to the refined 
and sovereign presence of one so exalted. 
But one of all these armies of the ambi- 
tious toward the same perfection can rise 



1 82 Solitarius to his D anion 

up and say, ' I am he with whom thou 
wert connatal, O divine art ! O perfect 
Law! O wisest of Sciences; — I am he 
God-chosen as thy first interpreter. I 
am thy prophet : believe thou me ?' To 
this art, or law, or science, all things 
now polarize and become newly affili- 
ated. The man has held a prism up be- 
fore Truth, and that which was seeming 
void is found latent with rainbows. 
Thales would thus stand with the ocean 
as primary datum ; Pythagoras, with a 
number ; Aristarchus, with a sun-dial»; 
Timochares, with a gathering, formative 
vapor. These great processes never halt. 
Like the sun they know no Sabbaths, 
since every day's duty done is every day's 
Sabbath. The great soul's life is one 
great prayer and one greater fulfilment 
of that prayer. The great soul's solitude 
is its Sabbath. 

We are living, demanding protests 
against the present and the past, — 
against the deed done and the conquest 
gained ; most constant believers in the yet 
undone, — the yet to be. Man perfect 



Solitude 183 



in his own sufficiency has become useless. 
The perfect poems are ruinously extrinsic 
— flat. It is his incompleteness and 
utterest imperfection that stirs man to 
surer things for himself and others. 
What though it be proven us by some 
effective process of reasoning that man 
and his ship of state are illusions ; 
and that as Theodorus was wont to leap 
about his galley on the poised oars of his 
slaves, so man learns his dexterous mis- 
sion only to find it a mere plaything. 
All this but alters the exigency ; it does 
not do away with it. To prove our pov- 
erties does not lift them from us, nor re- 
quite the fallen days cast down in hostage 
to so ignoble a deity. The gap of error 
must be bridged ; not analyzed. The 
cup of our errors that plays upon some 
nerves like a wild intoxicant, upon others 
as a poison hemlock, and upon others 
still as a opiate, — this must be spared 
us : not measured up and synthetized 
with the exactness of a hardened casuist. 
How easy to define, yet difficult to 
eschew evil ! A handful of dust — no 



184 Solitarius to his D anion 

more; it has no specific nobleness — no 
manifest splendor ; yet let the enlight- 
ened one prove to you that upon this 
plastic clod lies the footprint of the 
Christ, how silent has become your rev- 
erence, how shrinking all your scepti- 
cisms. The pessimist and the prophet 
alike would cavil the human race by 
proclaiming man dust that shall to dust 
return ; yet the footprint of God lies 
there. How intrinsic has become this 
hitherto invalid quality ! This clay has 
changed into a mark of majesty set upon 
the forehead of eternal things. What it 
was, the fools despise to name ; since 
fools shrank not to trod upon and pollute 
it. If you chanced to meet Socrates in 
the Athenian market-place, or the "fish- 
ers of men " upon the Galilean shores, 
think you that you would know them ? 
You would pass them by in silence till a 
greater voice than yours points them a 
place, even as in nature the pageant is 
forgotten till enlightened by the glory of 
a manly personality that pervades and 
interprets it. Only like understands like, 



Solitude 185 



and then only by the passport of a deed 
of depth and virility. The first and final 
study of mankind is the God in whose 
image man is : God in the least, God in 
the greatest, God in the all and every 
portion of the all. Man cannot study 
man as man without an inevitable despair 
at the finis. The channels of the carnal 
seeking are plowed deep through the 
dusts of presumption and downfall. 
Manhood is not there, and only manhood 
— that supremest type which it is our 
privilege to know and redeem, — is 
worthy our honor and our faith. Mere 
animality as a study for man, is dust to 
dust ; the footprint of the eternal that 
lies upon it, is forgotten in the sensual 
demand. 

It is the finesse of art that proves 
quality. Stratagem has taken cities and 
whole empires of fact by storm, though 
never a law or philosophy. Nature is 
ever on the alert ; you cannot steal upon 
her unawares, nor unnoted tamper with 
her treasuries. Newton's first nucleus of 



1 86 Solitarius to his Damon 

the Principia, Galileo's first step over the 
threshold of Time in the Florentine nave, 
Archimedes first glimpse of the Quad- 
ratura Paraboles, and Gautama's first 
solving of the planetary chain of Dhyan 
Choans under the Bo-tree, — these may 
be called strategies, — triumphs of finesse 
over Nature while she was asleep. But 
who presumes to calculate to what fine 
point the adamantine lance of the spirit 
of each of these was disciplined in order 
to insert it and pry open the door into 
this court of laws each finally entered, 
and over which took sovereignty ? An 
Indian mother will close the mouth of 
her sleeping babe if it chance to be open. 
There is here a whole catechism in a bar- 
barian's prudence. The wild Veddahs 
of Ceylon have a language of five words. 
The enlightened language of the soul has 
but one, — sympathy. All the rest is 
contact and assimilation. 

There are two balancing qualities in all 
capable things, — the nature of feeling 
and the nature of use. What thoughtful 
man that is not moved by the simplest 



Solitude 187 



studied industries of the animaicular 
world ? The tiny red spider and the con- 
stellation Orion are linked each to each 
by an insoluble truth. The astronomer 
calls for the finest line, — the nearest tan- 
gible answering to the geometrician's de- 
mand that a straight line have but one 
dimension — and gold, platinum, iridium, 
silver, — all respond but in vain. Only 
the little red spider finds favor, and he 
weaves his minute thread over the transit 
lense, and by its aid yonder star of the 
twelfth magnitude writes us a history of 
its orbit and function in space illimitable. 
The full-souled complete man is a solar 
system in miniture, of which he is soul 
and centre. All angles and protuber- 
ances, all depressions and plains are open 
secrets to every planet and satellite re- 
volving about him. We see a huge spot 
upon his very bosom if we are telescopic 
in our look, and we predict that he will 
cease to bear light in so and so long ; 
but the warm glow ceases not, and unto 
Time remains the same, — a beacon, a 
creator, a bounty of truth forever. We 



Solitarius to his Dcemon 



speculate concerning him, our theories 
all at variance ; but he is as removed as 
ever ; and too, like the sun, if we tres- 
pass too near, or bring him down too 
close to earth by our presuming lenses, 
he will burn to ashes everything beneath 
his direct ray. In his sunshine the dusts 
of humanity become visible. In the ra- 
vines and calm vales, on the glaciered 
pinnacles and by the shadowy wayside 
he is there, and his glory is the lamp by 
which we aspire on. Surely the great 
soul cannot be hidden or crushed. 

The circle of capacity of a great spirit 
is commensurable only by divine calcu- 
lus : the geometry of the gods ; and only 
gods are they who can circumscribe cir- 
les of sight about our highest finite see- 
ing. The centre of every circle in law, 
ethics, or the philosophy of natural effect 
is as much yours and mine as it was Plau- 
tus' or Varro's ; and we, standing upon 
the same apex, may describe a horizon as 
great and even greater. The circle that 
Plato, Euclid, and Pliny described about 
them may be described again. An as- 



Solitude 189 

tronomer takes great credit upon himself 
for having been rewarded in discovering 
a new star ; but who thinks of louding 
him for having created a new planet. He 
was the first discoverer, utilizer and in- 
terpreter of an established something 
which before him was nameless and un- 
catalogued. The thinker presumes not 
to be called a creator ; he is simply a find- 
er, a preserver, a statistician of superior 
ideas. He cannot hope always to out- 
think the Greek, nor out-dream the Arab, 
nor out-wit the Attican, nor out-chant 
the Lydian. The least and best of these 
are his to assimilate and command of him. 

Mere analytics and mind-values all 
sooner or later swim into the Sargossas 
sea of stagnation. Their currents are 
centripetal, beginning at the circumfer- 
ence and ending at the dead centre. The 
forces of God alone — the soul-values — 
are centrifugal, representing the diastole 
of the heart of nature. Truth interpreted 
by faith or philosophy needs no incanta- 
tions, nor magic mirrors, no sieves, nor 



190 Solitarius to his Dce?7ion 

sapphires to proclaim it. Even Hypatia 
descended to these, as did the Magi in 
the dynasty of the Sassanidae, and so be- 
came unworthy of her prestige. Truth 
is ever manifest through many openings 
downward ; the sun will not shine from 
under our feet, despite our prayers and 
protestations. It will never illumine the 
face of him who considers but the dust; 
for only dust and dust-presumption pro- 
ceed therefrom. When faith cries for 
the tangible, give it a coffin ; it is dead. 

Conventionality is the first parent of 
the artificial. It is the first abandon- 
ment of the man to the fever of temporal 
repute. It is the devil's passport into me- 
diocrity and its after-growth into pessi- 
mism and doubt. The listening ear of 
heaven bends closer the closet than the 
temple, — closer the sacred seclusion of 
the Mount of Olives than the swarming 
synagogue. God help him who is bad 
company with himself. If you are not a 
good symposiarch with the living and the 
dead great about your table, each lifting 
to his host a warm incense in his eye- 



Solitude 191 



look and sweet word and performing no- 
ble rites with every action, then is the 
problem of your days unanswered, and 
whatever your boast — your prestige or 
presumption — you are but half a being, 
half a controlled possession ; the subtiler, 
nobler portion yet unconceived, unborn. 
This holy inheritance which is your rea-r 
sonable birth-right, you are wantonly 
self-denied, and its reposeful scripture 
you know not. 

Solitude is a mortal's love-feast with 
the immortals, — a banquet with angels 
where even the disembodied man is one 
with the gods. Remove the human race 
to the solitude of the forest, isolating man 
from man with a single great thought to 
companion him, and four-fifths would 
die madmen, the one-fifth coming forth 
oracles. Men hate their own images as 
reflected upon their own solitary con- 
sciences. Dependence is our social dis- 
ease. Only labor in the divine presence 
of the ideal proving a very god in action, 
has the ring of sovereignty and the as- 
surances of truth enfolded in its very en- 



192 Solitarius to his Dfemon 

thusiasms, and carries the sure embryon 
of the deed done in the deed's doing, — 
half a triumph in the earnest aspiration. 
Let the soul speak, or be the mouth for- 
ever dumb. Let the truth within seek 
the truth without as Nature seeks her 
own, and as all element seeks its balance. 
In the creed of true moral affection there 
is no self — no ego. Only that which is 
resignation and a symbol of sacrifice can 
nurture in the heart the faith that re- 
moves mountains. Love is the first jus- 
tified attitude of knowledge. We become 
enlightened only through the affections. 
Where the soul enters not, God with- 
holds himself ; so false a temple is unfit 
to bear the footprints of the truer man. 
Love men as greater than men, and na- 
ture as greater than nature, if you would 
all things to appear as they are in their 
more superior moments. Then with eyes 
believingly fixed upon the perfect type, 
the mere proportions of the flesh will be 
lost in the nobility of the soul wherein 
are visible the sure outlines of omnipo- 
tence and power. 



The Poet" s Province 



My spirit holds a festival of dreams — 
A banquet reverie with gods on high; 

And life to-day to me is all it seems, 
And love to-day my simple rosary 
Whereon I count the warm beads prayerfully — 

Truth's blood-drops they, turned Godwise into stone, 
Necklaced upon the breast of the young Morn ; 

And I beneath her smile all, all alone, 

Kneel and receive this boon, and thence am torn 

From earth into her own empyrean rest, 

Pillowed upon her heaven there manifest. 
Lo ! with the midnight seers was I awake, 

Swearing Faith's logic: 'All, all's for the best;' 
And now as Nature's child, I labor for her sake. 



The Poefs Province 195 



THIRD PAPER. 



<&h* lfiott'# tyv&viintt* 



Solitaries now gir- _» , , 

dies Parnassus in a rOETRY IS a Consecrated 
devout theory, ,. - , , 

founds poetry on reading of nature by the 

faith, and demon- , ., , -. r ,. 

strates that with most vital of feeling tem- 

the decline of faith _ , T i . , 

our poets turn pes- peraments. The poet, by 

sirnists and ration. ^^ Qf ^ intrinsic qua j_ 

ity of his invention, proves himself to be 
only an intense believer. To him there 
is nothing that bears not a direct ap- 
proachable relation with a superior one 
of the same or a higher series. To 
him all things are naturally affiliated — 
balanced with perfect exactness in one 
another's motive — given exponents in 
every other of the same throughout the 
universe. The star and the spider ; the 



196 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

north pole mammal and the tropic insec" 
tivera ; the lowest parasite of animal con- 
dition and the highest perfection of hu- 
man intellect, — these to the poet's mind 
have interchangable affinities, a direct 
line of analogy from the remotest of any 
sunken era to the supermost of the en- 
lightened present. !he poet's is emi- 
nently an objective quality ; the subjec- 
tive sinking beyond the immediate at his 
touch of faith. All that claims identity 
has become force in his eyes, — not mere 
matter, mere animality — but a force in 
the upbuilding nature of things common- 
place, casting influences over its content 
poraneous quality wherever met and 
recognized — an influence to a nobler 
and surer use. The stars, the sunset, 
morning and autumn, the perpetuity of 
Wisdom and all sublime approvals of 
character, — these the poet respects and 
enshrines his tremendous believing, re- 
alizing power within, not for themselves 
alone , but rather for their direct influences 
wherever realized. They are so much 
creation as they have creating power in 



The Poefs Province 197 

turn ; so much God as in good. The 
poet's mind thus personalizing the con- 
templated thing, quickens it with a 
spiritual force till it redeems itself, as it 
were, rises from the embryon of mere 
matter and becomes force ; from mere 
animality and becomes manhood. Every 
such mind, by virtue of its intrinsic be- 
lief and realizing power, becomes as a 
prophet over a certain chaos from which 
at that inspired touch a creation must 
rise forth and proclaim the man. 

The limitations of expression, as Lam- 
artine has maintained, stand without the 
poetical value of that expression ; in 
other words, poetry stands within, but 
the poetical issue in the idea stands with- 
out the bounds of necessary limitation. 
Poetry, a universal spirit ; an abstract 
quality standing one and apart ; poesy, 
a confined, resilient and concrete idea. 
So Moffet holds, too, with Coleridge. 
There are epics and heorics of the highest 
intrinsic excellence in our very common- 
place ways and means which no mere 
laws of sound, harmony and deflection 



198 Solitarius to his Damon 

can encircle and command. As, accord- 
ing to Sainte-Beuve, there is a dead poet 
in most men, so O Daemon, there is to 
the poet's eye a kindred poet in all ma- 
terial things. Where there is a material 
datum to the physicist, there is a dual 
value in the same to the poet. 

" More powerful than Sesostris is a 
great poet, and more formidable than 
Phalaris is a wicked one," observed the 
piquant and genial Landor. The law of 
contrasts affiliates with every known law 
of progression. Contrast has the power 
of proving by an intensity of motive that 
few can escape who contemplate. Art 
without shadows, music without discord, 
logic without negatives to throw their 
complementing affirmatives in torelief, — 
these proclaim a philosophy of details, 
stagnation, and reversion. Attraction 
and repulsion, zenith and nadir, noon 
and night, must all concentrate upon the 
will of the poet, — must all exercise a 
creating power that shall be measured by 
the rapidity and intensity of these con- 
trasting changes. These find them in him 



The Poet's Province 199 

outlets in expressions of power, taste 
and exactness. As a thinker the poet 
must avail himself of every credential of 
art, science, or religions, that by the 
passport of a universal respect he may 
enter the court of their several provinces 
and be esteemed worthy as interpretei 
and confidant. Poetry as absolute idea 
is a universal evidence of God. It stands 
on isolated ground, bearing distinct, un- 
utterable values which know no other 
language than that of pure passion. Plato 
exerted this sovereignty over the uni- 
versal factor, even though he did exclude 
the poet from his Republic, since he 
affirms that poetry comes nearer the vital 
truth than all history. Poetry is the prod- 
uct of the intuitions ; and only the intui- 
tions are to be trusted. Educated honor, 
educated integrity, educated refinements 
of feeling, require rites, formulas and 
priestly apothegms to prove them up in 
the regard of the mind. The soul is all 
instinct, and stands alone and apart. Its 
refined intuitions are worth a thousand 
curriculums. Feeling and sympathy are 



Solitarius to his Damon 



mettled of that thoroughly spontaneous 
virtue which cannot be willed into life 
by any extraneous force of art or artifice. 
Poetry being a personalized passion — a 
truth intuitive with the man now a very 
god in action and the sublimity of his 
purpose — it becomes the soul's first cre- 
dential, and the first mutual interpreter 
to every other soul. Such a spirit can 
but multiply itself into every known qual- 
ity forever: go on rejecting analysis that 
dignifies not the subject, proclaiming the 
divine values hidden in the meshes and 
sordid crevices of the commonplace, and 
otherwise proving that the profoundest 
truths have built solid temples even at 
our very doorstep, even though we as 
fact-deifying worshippers enter them not, 
unknowing of our privilege. Poetry 
would prove to us that in every contact 
of our conscious life there is a somewhat 
that seeks the man in every homely rela- 
tion, though the tender knock escapes 
our apathetic ears, and we lie dormant 
with enriching but invisible actions going 
on about us. 



The Poefs Province 



The true poet then, O Daemon, is not 
merely a builder of Parthenons, but a 
builder of humanity. He is not merely 
a temple-architect, but a founder of the 
very creed in whose honor it is raised. 
He is not a mere maker of means, but a 
maker of men. As Joubert has said, lie is 
not merely the Daedalus and the Phidias, 
but the very god-like Prometheus. He 
comes as a prophet over a certain pro- 
found and unrestricted province wherein 
Beauty is first freeman. He has herein 
become a reasoner beyond all reason ; a 
logician trancending logic, the establisher 
of a surer, profounder faith. 

The disorganizing genius is the lowest 
birth into condition ; the creating, pre- 
serving and the upbuilding, the rarest. 
The progressive, sustaining mind seems 
to break forth like the providential issue 
of some anomaly, — some stained, irreg- 
ular condition of the times. We may 
with a single blow destroy the labor of 
love of some divine mind, — some holy 
reaching out for the truth — some devout 
thing of beauty and bravery so fervently 



Solitarius to his Damon 



believed in by the faith that brought it 
forth, and both the man and the deed are 
fallen. We may heap words upon the 
back of an idea, not knowing that its 
very charm is delicacy, and so crush it 
back into eternity. We may strike a her- 
ald of the truth a disenchanting blow 
with a single word, and he will recover 
not, sinking back into the gulf whence 
he rose with the morning. Man is car- 
nally the dissolving element, seeking the 
higher only that he may consume it in 
the test crucible of materialities by his 
damnable alchemy. But it is neither a 
great evidence of power nor a manifest 
attribute of progress that subverts our 
honest sciences, and by levelling the su- 
perior, so exalt itself. It is rather that 
all-encouraging, all-doing virtue which 
bores to the heart of things, not to fill it 
with dynamite and dissolution, but with 
strength and respect. Man is ever a 
gravitating organism when left to his 
own caprice. He would ever plunge 
downward, bearing all within his reach 
to the darkness whither he proceeds. He 



The Poefs Province 203 

is one huge datum of voltaism — a down- 
ward, dynamic engine which few have 
the skill to reverse. We love power, but 
we love it as Commodus loved it : to kill 
rather than to defend the innocent. 

The orientals are almost wholly with- 
out a pictorial art. History runs to 
rhyme, not to color. Mere decoration 
is their ultimatum, refined and distin- 
guished as it is. Music and verse are the 
outlets of all their passion ; in the former 
they are restricted but earnest ; in the 
latter, superior and skilful. The Bed- 
ouins about their camp-fires at Jericho 
and the Japanese worshipper before Di- 
butzu have an identical idea to make 
manifest in their music ; but in their po- 
etical qualities each is grandly individual 
and both something higher than mere 
minstrels. The true thought even in the 
heart of the rudely refined oriental is a 
tangible universal unit, and is never lost 
sight of. They see in every fact a pre- 
diction pointing to a certitude, a law, a 
scripture. Everything has a name not as 
concrete particular, but as representing 



204 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

2l condition or a spiritual aspect. Thus a 
camel in motion is known by one name ; 
at rest, by another ; drinking, by a third; 
bearing a burden, by a fourth. It is es- * 
sentially the poet's language, regardless 
of trite forms and phraseology. It finds 
and interprets the super- values in the 
thing given. The oriental worships force. 
Force spiritual, not material ; force that 
arms capacity, and, like the king, can 
never die. A fact in a certain light has 
a signified value and claims devotion ; in 
another light the same fact receives anew 
devotion. The old worship is left be- 
hind, the new worship born ever upon 
the moment. Thus the oriental epic is 
one never-ending prayer : at once a 
thanksgiving and a prophecy. They are 
true poets who behold all things in a sort 
of apotheosis, — a deification of the fact 
beyond itself, representing a figure of 
higher worth and a new, unique trans- 
parency of idea. 

Poetry then is the transfusion of the 
spirituality of God into the common- 



The Poefs Province 205 

place. It is the ultra-evidence of the 
thing given which the soul alone has the 
power to interpret. Poesy should be the 
expression of the poetry of the circum- 
stance. It should be what it is not through 
the real, but through the revelation of the 
real, which revelation is in turn a prophet 
over another circumstance still higher and 
ever in the same ratio thronghout the em- 
pire of the heart. One in five thousand 
of the people of Attica was a man of gen- 
ius according to Galen, and the average 
ability of the Greeks was much higher 
than the modern average. They were 
self-knowing ; and, if the fundamental 
syllogisms of Lao-Tze. the wise and 
gifted herald of Confucius, be honored 
with credence, he that knows others is 
wise ; but he that knows himself is en- 
lightened : that is, in the oriental mood, 
he is inspired. Pure genius that, where- 
ever it moves and with whatever it deals, 
imparts somewhat " inventive and crea- 
tive," as Blair quotes from the Greek, 
— this quality is rarer indeed now than 
ever. Yet, be it thankfully maintained 



206 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

that though we know no sovereign mas- 
ter of such supreme power as they in the 
infancy of Greek induction, yet we are 
inflicted with no Spartan or Median helot. 
The mass is enlightened though at the 
expense of the sinking of the individual. 

All poetry is the accumulation of vast 
and varied experiences which have be- 
come crystallized in the transition from 
reality into realism. Every throb of joy 
is a recalled record of many joys behind 
it, every figure or trope, the history of 
many minds. We have heard of toads 
leaping from the heart of stones when 
shattered by the miner's mallet. Men 
have been bound up hand and foot, pris- 
oned and concealed in some hidden 
crevice of human sufferance, — stony 
sepulchers of ignorance and error with 
the very holy light of heaven shut 
out from their solitary homes. And 
they, O Daemon, — they have learned 
their silent missions well, all their little 
world now become quite familiar ; but 
without and beyond this belittling con- 



I 



The Poet's Province 207 

templation, there lies a forest, an ocean, 
a star, a universe, of which the bound-up 
mortal knows nothing. But let some 
disclosing blow from a solemn circum- 
stance — some blow direct from heav- 
en — shatter that stone environment, and 
lo ! the man leaps forth, a thinker, a 
freeman — a poet. 1 he gospel of our 
day is the breaking of chains. The glory 
of our sun is that it shines upon all. 
Traditions, prestiges, chiefdoms, fall ; the 
man is risen. The publican becomes the 
republican ; and higher still than the re- 
publican man, he becomes man the re- 
public. Around this intense globe of 
our social state there girds an equatorial 
belt of pure truth. Once that belt was 
imperceptible — like a find thread of gold 
stretched into intangible fineness ; but 
with the development of the races this 
belt widens, waging toward the poles, 
triumphing over ignorance, purifying 
every province of vice, ever proving and 
furthering man in his ascendency, and 
warming with tropic sunshine these bar- 
ren areas of animalism and want. 



208 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

But with all this success, severe detail 
seems still in a measure to remain our 
modern point of climax. Principles are 
swallowed up in their members ; laws 
become expositors of the fact instead of 
these detailed members pointing as an 
index to a new authority. Great action 
is rare because of the rarity of great 
thinking; and great thinking is rare be- 
cause the mind will crouch. Mortality 
will ever exert itself to crush down the 
immortal; the senses, to refute the spirit- 
ual evidence. It still remains easier to 
hang the head than to look up and wage 
heroically onward. No hanging head 
ever did anything but the coward's work ; 
no hanging head ever thought. The 
philosophy of detail should be the end 
of a great beginning ; not the beginning 
of an end ; for the thought that leads to 
no higher, is not thought : it is whim. If 
the biped will not think, let his arms be- 
come fore -legs again ; his fingers, claws ; 
his language limited to barks and hay- 
ings ; and let him crawl as was his 
primeval wont. 



The Poefs Province 209 



True silence is the concentration of 
intellect upon things as whole ; not as 
fragments and integral parts. Petty nici- 
ties, refuse details challenging their prin- 
cipals to no issue, pert scepticisms and 
the confounding of types, — these small 
inlets into sub-inlets and forth into nega- 
tion, create not ; they but encumber. 
Mere facts stand only as hands on the 
dial ; they point toward completeness, but 
they are not concrete principles any 
more than the dial-hands are Time. As 
Milton has said, knowledge is the mind's 
food, and may be taken with as extreme 
intemperance as food and drink for the 
body. Excess is suicide, even of religions 
and arts as of animal stimulants ; even of 
facts and hyper-detail to the exclusion of 
principles, as of the stomach to the 
neglect of the mind. The intellect cries, 
' Balance ! ' If there is not immediate 
response, somewhere there is a sufferer. 
Excess of the best and least, leads only 
to madness. 

Seneca says Nature has given us the 



Solitarius to his Damon 



seeds of knowledge, and not knowledge 
itself. Even so has God given us the 
seeds of religion rather than religion it- 
self. These seeds must be sown to-day 
and reaped to-morrow. What cares the 
thinker for the seeds sown centuries ago 
in other climes and in other hearts ? Are 
these fruits diviner indeed than ours ? 
Let them stand for symbols ; they have 
their certain use. The history of the pres- 
ent is a scripture that out-voices the ar- 
chaic hymns and obsolete rituals of all the 
sacred past. The present alone is sacred ; 
and that in so much as it is unprofaned 
by triviality and exercised to the fulfil- 
ment of a superior truth. The thinker 
believes nothing impossible ; yet, at the 
very moment, is devoutly indisposed to 
believe that anything extraordinary or 
supernatural has been done. He be- 
comes a creature of infinite hope and of 
sure and undisturbed faith through all 
the vicissitudes natural to the sensitive 
temperament. He will not deify the past ; 
he will not hold up a relegated tradition 
and call it divine ; he will not set up 



The Poefs Province 



Baal at his doorstep to batter down thrice 
a day merely as an instructive lesson for 
youth, neither set up in the sacred pre- 
cincts of his home a household Hestia, 
nor a counterfeit avatar, nor the lares et 
penates of any Jew, or Persian, or Mede 
that ever swore by any religion than that 
of pure thought, any God than that of 
love. The thinker cannot be ensnared 
into a worship of what is past. The 
brave man's Now is, in his justified sight, 
the only divine moment worthy a living 
worship. To him, O Daemon, the God 
of his fathers was never nearer earth than 
to-day. In his eyes the times ameliorate 
— grow prof ounder in wisdom and purity, 
grow surer of perception and ideals. 
The true was never truer, the just never 
more just, the good was never better, nor 
beauty more beautiful than in the infinite, 
God-encompassed Now. To be sure, the 
philosophical era gives way to the me- 
chanical ; the idealist's to the realist's ; 
the century of inductive syllogism to the 
century of inductive shoe-making and 
bridge-building and mountain-tunneling. 



Solitarius to his Dcemon 



But the good survives — the fittest and 
worthiest of any age survives the radical 
reaction, and serves as a prop to the com- 
ing revival some years and centuries be- 
yond. To the thinker the heart of man 
was never more inspired ; to him the 
God who came in thunders, throned upon 
pillars of fire and manifest supernatural- 
isms which challenge our wonder, now 
comes in the ministering guise of social 
melioration ; is manifest in this quiet, 
studied advancement toward the enlight- 
ened, superior man ; is interpreted ever 
and ever more profoundly in each brave 
on- waging stroke of progress. The God 
that is goodness cannot be withheld in 
the merest archives of a bound book or 
enrolled parchment, nor be shelved up 
with the extinguished brazen candlesticks 
of a fallen orthodoxy or relegated creed. 
The God of to-day is he interpreted in 
every proving of the ascendency of man- 
hood toward godhood ; the supplanting 
of wars and bloodshed with peace and 
tolerance ; tyrannies with freedom ; ser 
vility with equality ; and heathen immo 



The Poet's Province 213 

lations, rites and barbarities with the 
diviner arts that lift, dignify and prove 
the man a surer, truer image of his sover- 
eign God. Who dares say. O Daemon, 
that the times are not inspired ? 

The poet demands! Why force thy 
faith back thirty centuries to find the only 
time when God walked hand in hand 
with man ? Are there not prophets to- 
day as truly inspired as any that you may 
name in the dead past ? Receive we not 
our revelations, O Daemon, from as as- 
sured a source as they of old? The poet 
would not pull down the shrines of the 
dead saints; he would lift the living ones 
co-equal. Not less faith in the dead great, 
but a firmer faith in the living, is the 
poet's creed. He finds more God in the 
living man than in the dead saint. He 
believes that we are saint-making, 
prophet-making, hero-making as truly 
to-day as ever in the world's history. The 
true religion of the heart is the religion 
of the divine present, — the living, breath- 
ing, assuring, acting, aspiring faith that 
leans upon no dead yesterday for support 



214 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

and maintenance. The religion with which 
thought has to deal is the religion of the 
almighty Now. It can no more be com- 
pared with the religion of Solomon than 
a poem to a star ; they are both evidences 
of God in just so much as is good ; but 
beyond this, are wholly incomparable 
each with the other. We swear by that 
which lies on the upper shelf covered 
with dust. We point our fingers at this 
one and that, calling them harsh names, 
while that which we consider divinity it- 
self lies relegated to the attic. This wor- 
ship of the dead prophets and a sneer at 
the living ones is the ruling pietism of 
the day. If you cannot read Hyperion, 
nor listen to the Fifth Symphony, nor 
take to heart the refined harmonies of 
color in the works of the modern master, 
even as if they were all grand good gospel 
■ — scriptural enlightenments to this unre- 
alizing age, worthy our respect as visita- 
tions of the unseen God to the better 
shaping of the rude heart of man — they 
have lost their keen and refined signifi- 
cance in wedging their way into the deeps 



The Poet's Province 



of so repellent and reluctant a nature 
The voices of the living endeavor and the 
deeds of living conscience that stir the 
contemporary mind to braver doing, — 
these must sound like Sabbath-day cho- 
ruses and take the habit of divinity to the 
perceiving heart, or lost will be the living 
voice of their Creator, as fresh and as- 
sured a revelation to-day as it was three 
thousand years ago, and will be three 
thousand years hence. And this is just 
and reasonable truly. To-day the tears 
of sympathy and applause stand burning 
on our lids when beholding the beautiful 
act of some beautiful mind, even the deed 
of a little child that is stirred to disinter- 
ested action in a good cause, and to-mor- 
row we go to sleep hearing about Joshua 
and the plains of Ajalon. The former we 
call heroism, the latter, religion. But 
why persist we in looking to dead days 
and deeds to summon our worship ? Has 
the world really stopped scripture-mak- 
ing ? Are there not then daily miracles 
at our very door-step ? Why is not the 
God as near earth in that simple deed of 



2i6 Solitarius to his D anion 

a child's heroism — that simple proving 
of the divinity of manhood — as ever upon 
the plains of Ajalon ? Whatever stirs the 
heart of man to the noblest activity, — 
this, O Daemon, is the best, the truest relig- 
ion. The gospel that compels us to think, 
to act, breathe, better things, — seems it 
not truer to Nature's God than the gos- 
pel we go to sleep over? Divinity with 
a confiding realism in every encourage- 
ment, lies on our right hand and our left. 
We think it, exhale it, talk it, act it ; and 
still, O Daemon, we comprehend it not. 
Why persist we in perceiving the divine 
only through the damp of tombs and the 
vapors of death ? Is our God become a 
dead God ? — our Creator and Preserver 
merely a stone diety and an illusory phan- 
tasm for our cringing kiss and sacrificial 
prayer ? Must men suffer martyrdom to 
merit respect of their co-equals. The 
ages of crucifixions for the righteous, of 
hemlock for the defenders of truth, of im- 
paling and imprisonment for the seekers 
of the God in science, of Inquistions for 
readers of scriptures written on the broad 



The Poet's Province 217 

brows of planets and satellites, of blaz- 
ing faggots for the searcher of divinity in 
the forest, and in the wide wilderness of 
the passionful heart of man rather than 
in the court and sacristy, of torture 
for reformers and whipping posts for in- 
nocents branded as enchanters and sor- 
cerers — the ages of these, thank God, has 
passed away ; but has our respect and 
reverence for the heroism of the honest 
heart, O Daemon, passed away with them, 
and left us churlish, belittled and cunning 
doubters naked of all our native magnan- 
imity ? 

We must rid ourselves of this bloat- 
ing tyranny of convention, and behold the 
God in the living rather than the dead 
deed — the living rather than the dead 
manhood. To give direction to the prog- 
ress of thought, to channel the uninvad- 
ed wilderness with a devout seeking, to 
bridle a superstition and check it back 
into its primary stage of devotion — 
these are the prerogatives of poets and 
thinkers in the mart or in the mosque, in 



218 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

the counting-room as in the court, in the 
forest as in the closet. To let the in- 
spired countenance of man beam forth 
the gladness of a God ; to contemplate 
his noble deed as aGod's deed ; his devout 
and zealous striving toward higher ideals 
in character and worth be as a revelation 
pure and fresh from the well-springs of 
heaven — these are the privileges — aye, 
duties, of the imperial mind. Ah, how 
small is that faith, O Daemon, that main- 
tains the Book of Revelations to be the 
last book of the Bible. Are there not 
thousands and tens of thousands of last 
books ? Not a day but one is written — 
on the bold front of our social institu- 
tions, on the domes of every capitol of 
west-waging, God-waging progress, on 
the throbbing bosoms of our arts, on the 
sanctified palms of our charities — every- 
where the heart of man is lifted, and the 
sordid flesh yields to the ascendant life- 
proving spirit. The great world is daily 
Bible-making, scripture-revealing, saint- 
proving. These scriptures shall not be 
encompassed with the mere formulas of 



The Poet's Province 219 

the material didactics, with the mere bab- 
bling of the reasonless bigot, with the 
shallow sophistries and vaunting blasphe- 
mies of the trifler and reversionist. Truth 
died not with Christ, nor Socrates, nor 
Bruno, nor Copernicus, nor Spinoza ; the 
truth lives. What belittling conceptions 
of Truth crucified, Truth martyrized, 
Truth scourged, is that which believes 
that it lives not still in every bettering 
act, in every honest striving toward puri- 
ty and manliness, in every casting out of 
the devils of sensualism and rancor from 
the heart, and every devout outreaching 
through the solid darkness for the light ! 
Every grand work of art that stirs the 
heart of man with the like ennobling 
whence it sprung, every great battle that 
throws the tide of sovereignty over the 
meridian that divides barbarism from 
civilization, every melody that refines the 
appetite for higher classicism, is gospel 
revealed and consecrate, all worthy our 
veneration and confidence. These are 
arts of the apostles which are not to be 
bound up in regal parchment and gilded 



Solitarius to his .Daemon 



of edge to invite inspection and reverence : 
they command them — compel them. They 
are the living scriptures unchronicledand 
unworded ; yet of a moving grace un- 
quenchable and staid. Like all true re- 
ligion, they are unwritten, unspeakable; 
deeds, sympathies and the refinements of 
feeling are their only mediums man to 
man. Now is the true apocalypse. 
Then is but a dead formula for our safer 
seeing ; it is but a dead religion to the 
living soul. 

The poet would not that mankind bear 
a less faith in the Christ, but a greater 
faith in men ; not indeed honor the Christ 
as God with less fidelity, but as man with 
more. He would not unprop any man's 
creed or temple ; he would only see the 
man stand forth a free and noble image 
of his Creator above all creeds, superior 
to all temples. He would not tear down 
any trusted idol ; he would simply lift 
the spirit into that exalted self-seeing so 
enlightened and sure, that the regenerate 
man shall tear it down himself. 






The Poefs Province 



No genuine truth was ever discovered 
and smothered in obscurity. The gen- 
uine, the earnest, the firm, however un- 
availing may seem the issue on the mo- 
ment, will maintain even in the face of 
more brilliant diplomacy, more brazen 
policy and exacter science. The honest 
thought is the only thought ; all else 
thinks, writes, paints, constructs and rea- 
sons, the merest sophism. Truth no soon- 
er discovers itself, — that is, discovers its 
man able to interpret it to the utmost — 
than it becomes sovereign. Nature has es- 
tablished a law of outlet and inlet for every 
receptive and creative organism. There 
was never a truly great idea — a truly in- 
spired revealment of heaven — that died 
with the man. Why should Nature be so 
prodigal of gifts manifestly rare, and 
which, be assured, cost a divine some- 
thing somewhere a great throe to bring 
into being, that they may die in obscu- 
rity ? As Johnson demonstrates, pleasure 
passes from the eye to the ear as knowl- 
edge advances ; but as it declines, returns 
to the eye again. We become creatures 



Solitarius to his Damon 



of keener sensations and fewer words as 
man ascends the scale of intellectual 
and spiritual excellence ; thought and 
sensation tearing away the barriers be- 
tween them when the soul speaks. Alas, 
O Daemon, that words may never hope 
to stand for more than the merest symbols 
of the thought, the virtue, the quickened 
spirit ; that passion has but one language 
— passion; that the soul is its best and 
only interpreter. The language of lips is 
only a provincial dialect of the heart. The 
real language of spirit to spirit is spirit ; 
the truest medium heart to heart if feel- 
ing, — wordless, tongueless, yet in its very 
poverties disdainful, in its very sovereign- 
ty humble yet austere. Extremes of grief, 
joy, love, aspiration, have in their su- 
premer moments stepped from the land 
of language to the land of no words. Lan- 
guage may impart knowledge ; it cannot 
impart love. Who loves and knows not, is 
nearer Truth than is he who knows and 
loves not. Nature is a greater feeling 
than philosophy ; and who would best 
know her, must first love her. Truth and 



The Poets Province 223 

the heart of man will listen to love long 
after reason has proven itself unworthy, 
long after thought, induction and policy 
have calloused the heart impenitent in 
its own embittering corruption. 

The greatest poet is not he who 
knows the most nor the surest ; it is he 
that makes the divinest use of material 
things, completing in the heart of man 
the full circle of which he is but an arc, 
a segment of completeness, at his birth. 
He is the greatest poet, whatever the out- 
let of his genius, that has a whole man- 
kind bound up as within the walls of a 
mustard seed, and laid down in the mid- 
most holy of holies of his great good 
heart. He believes with Gautama, that 
he is the greatest warrior who has con- 
quered himself, and so proves this truth 
daily. He finds philosophy in men's 
ways, art in men's deeds, music in men's 
words, and divinity in men's souls beyond 
all written scripture. In every child be- 
holds he the infant Christ ; in every good 
doer of deeds, Christ the miracle-worker ; 



224 Solitarius to his Damon 

in every speaker of kindly, heart-nurtur- 
ing words, Christ on the mount ; in every 
servant faithful to his trust, Christ the 
carpenter ; in every honest effort fallen, 
the Christ crucified and the Christ as- 
cended. This is then the poet's creed ; 
superior to all things, yet reverencing all 
things as .superiors. He can bear the 
sun's noon upon his foreherd in his 
youth ; time will come when he will want 
a forest to thatch his bowed heart. He 
walks forth a new, an inspired, and an 
universal believer. We may preach, but 
only religion believes. We may be poets, 
but only poets understand. Like assim- 
ilates like ; like believes like. The poet's 
processes sound very like mysticism ; yet 
what takes not the habit of mystery to 
the finite man ? Our commonest pro- 
cesses of thought, our meagrest theol- 
ogies, our easiest satisfied desires, escape 
not the charge of mysticism. Philoso- 
phies demonstrate the evolution of fac- 
tors, of man, of will and the intuitions ; 
but what demonstrates the evolution of 
evolution. The soul in its ascendency 



The Poets Province 225 

from the material has erased all foot- 
prints ; there might have been a time 
when light was knowable to the finite 
mind, but it has long passed into the un- 
knowable — the religion of mere conject- 
ure and theory — and we talk by mere 
symbols and substantives which stand for 
things which at best we can but imper- 
fectly conceive. In Mammoth Cave was 
found the skeleton of an explorer who 
had made fast a thread at the entrance 
of that vast pit of mystery, and, torch in 
hand, had wandered down into the bow- 
els of the earth some miles, dealing out 
the precious cord to the end. But in re- 
tracing, the torch gave out, the thread 
broke, and both the man and his labor 
were lost. In truth, O Daemon, the mind 
cannot weave a thread that shall carry us 
down through the solid darkness of the 
mysterious Unknown beyond an arm's 
length. The materialist inevitably re- 
traces, or its irretrievably lost. In both 
cases the finis is despair. 

We proceed from wisdom to enlight- 



226 Solitarius to his Damon 

enment, according to the seers of the 
East. Thoroughly oriental is this word 
'enlightenment;' it is almost the whole 
doctrine of Buddha in a nutshell. To be 
enlightened, in the oriental sense, is to 
experience a revelation. Who would 
know, need but to collate ; who would 
become enlightened, must seek the di- 
vine Unseen through the ever-present 
seen, and labor on through the unknown 
with a faith to an exalted end. Progress 
is a law not to be confounded with mere 
motion. Progress to a purpose : motion 
merely to an end. Progress shall never 
cease ; it lies beyond and superior to any 
law of dynamics ; but mere motion shall 
resume its primary state, and sleep at 
length in the stagnation of primitive 
chaos. 

The higher music, too, like the higher 
poetry, is a sort of religious mysticism. 
We cannot take it to absolute reason, for 
like all things so essentially spiritual, 
while solving to no issue nor dignifying 
the central truth, reason bears down but 
clumsy analysis upon it ; and no harp- 



The Poet's Province 227 

string of Zion or Bayreuth will stand the 
thump of a trip-hammer. This mysticism, 
as the poor inveterate flesh chooses to 
call it, is the mysticism of the Christ 
when he said, 'I am one with the Father: 
ye shall be one with me,' — mysticism 
which the heart understands, though the 
lips are halt to make manifest the truth 
as the heart has taken it to confidence, 
Before such truth all language shrinks, 
and silence takes up the thread of inter- 
pretation, giving the truth that unworded 
significance which surpasses all written 
scripture. 

Music, too, is most fortunate by virtue 
of its sovereign independence. It de- 
mands of no sister science nor art a help- 
mate ; of no contemporary does it ask 
alms ; of no superior, a vantage. It does 
not even beseech a hearing, so content is 
it, edifying its principal. As its own prov- 
idence it stands one and apart ; beyond 
the merest technicalities, it asks nothing 
of the intellect ; being a pure product of 
the soul, it appeals but to the soul. Law 
it transcends, being superior to it ; defi- 



228 Solitarius to his Damon 

nitions, abstracts, theories, it disdains, 
ever risen above these encumbrances. It 
is solitary and cumulative, — nature un- 
spoken, unwritten, unharassed, untram- 
melled : hence, nature ever in its truest 
aspect. Enemies meet over an old tune, 
and forthwith forget their feuds. The 
barbarian and the scholar suddenly be- 
come mutual ; suddenly become mani- 
festly seized of the fact that each soul 
balances the other, though the scholar's 
intellect over-reaches the barbarian's by 
a whole system. But they trust each 
other now, having become cognizant of 
a certain affinity. Music is a liquid di- 
vinity which in the heart crystallizes and 
solidifies, becoming character most re- 
fined, nature most natural. 

We are living laws ; moving maxims ; 
personalized inspirations ; the spiritual 
within the spiritualizing while of the 
earth earthy. We are, even while the 
carnality of race and member runs slug- 
gish in our veins, perpetual altars of 
Vesta with a holy incense in our eye- 



The Foefs Province 229 

look, — the aureola which the soul casts 
over all material things till they be in- 
fused of our own splendid element. We 
are all greater or lesser prophets by a 
birthright wholly our own, and antici- 
pate the era from the conscious epoch 
on the heart. Thought being ever the 
herald and sequel of action, the primary 
doing is a container of deeds ever beyond 
itself and superior to it, and thus a power 
beneath power. We carry parts of other's 
selves within us, — an incomplete affec- 
tion which at the recalling moment is 
complete and for a season. We are all 
concrete analogies, — parts of other's 
selves. The sun rises and sets in our 
habits ; they are the tender harp-strings 
upon which we momently play, be the 
resultant sound a discord or a harmony. 

Music is the soul's outlet which shall 
not serve two masters. Either it is music 
of the head, or music of the heart. In 
the former, it descends to the merest 
mechanism ; in the latter, not to be con- 
fined in the narrow parallels of intellect- 



230 Solitarins to his Dcemon 

ual approval. Music can embody nearer 
a whole idea without doing it an injus^ 
tice than any other medium soul to soul. 
Music is our especial delight in that it 
compels us to think , to paint with an in- 
dividual grace our own landscapes and 
fix our own images. What finds not 
within us a creative response rather than 
a created one, — a moving power rather 
than a power moved — finds not the secret 
of our delight. We love that which com- 
pels our love ; admire that which com- 
pels our admiration rather than merely 
inviting it ; and we respect that which 
forces us to be superior to ourselves in 
its refined presence. It is not he who 
merely loves his art who shall succeed ; 
it is rather he who is utterly miserable 
without its holy influences. Music that 
impels these inductive currents of spon- 
taneity we become entranced by, even as 
by the stroke of an Egyptian sorceress, 
words, images, sweet excesses that refine 
our charities and endue our sordid mo- 
ments with a respect for sentiment, — all 
rushing like tempest from the regenerate 



The Poets Province 231 

heart, and proving our barren souls fer- 
tile and life-giving throughout eternity. 

Nature endows all actions with in- 
visible eyes and ears, tongues and voices. 
They see and proclaim what the language 
of lips are halt to avow, — the motive be- 
hind the deed. But the soul is of more 
value in the sight of heaven than any 
other truth. God will not exchange a 
soul for any other evident divinity the 
universe over. We must stand and be 
judged as containers of divine things, 
even though we never liberated or in- 
terpreted one by our deed or word. The 
moment the soul speaks, the peerage of 
fact as fact is broken ; and all straight- 
line mediocrity which is our radical ab- 
horrence, has disclosed itself. The spirit 
lies like a fine stratum of divinity be- 
tween every couplet of written truth. It 
is not poetry written, but the poetry un- 
written that the finer nature exults in, 
and takes to the Cor cordium. 

But truth is the currency only of very 
near friends and very distant enemies. 



232 Solitarius to his Daemon 

Like a sun-glass, it will not focus itself 
upon any middle distance without setting 
fire to everything it would illuminate. 
Therefore, in the society of more than 
one and one, the nature is more or less 
denaturalized, — more or less false to its 
own principle. Truth, easy and mutual 
between one and one, becomes diffused 
and halt with the advent of the third and 
fourth ; then commences the devil's spar- 
ring, the carom of conventional nothings 
upon one another's surface-wit, and Truth 
becomes transformed, distorted, hooded 
now like a pious monk, now like an insid- 
ious devil, and dare not lift its head for 
fear of ridicule or of contamination with 
the unclean. Only when one and one 
have met upon the apex of some divine 
outlook, is the breath of brotherhood in 
things godlike and removed felt upon the 
mutual cheek. The yoke of carnality 
and affectation is thrown aside, the man- 
hood laid bare to the mutual respect, and 
that great-hearted, noble, severe image 
of the God beholden to the finite seeing. 
The sensual man to the sensual man is 



The Poet's Province 233 

dust to dust ; and as such, passes current 
coin in this general mart of man-slaves. 
Only two grand spirits with that divine, 
innate, centralizing respect which the 
Creator holds for us, pass in each other's 
eyes as currency of the gods, — that dust 
fallen to earth in the hewing of one of 
the pillars of the seventh heaven. 

Though all thinkers are contemplated 
of men as one and inseparable, like the 
double stars which appear a unit, by the 
dissolving aid of an exact science they 
are found to be some millions of miles 
apart. Two men of genius meet : why is 
there not a mutual persuasibility at once 
established ? They are as solitary planets 
each casting an influence over the other 
perhaps, but they cannot come together 
in a single day when it would require 
light itself some thousand years to span 
the distance. God does not suffer the 
great planets ever to come in contact 
in reality, however assuring the appear- 
ances. Their orbits are fixed and they 
must abide. Eternity lies between the 



234 Solitarius to his Damon 

soul and every other soul , men cannot 
be so mutually understood as is common- 
ly believed. In the face of such a thinker 
as has this command upon nature, prate 
not of fame : he shuns it. Prate not of 
philosophy : he transcends it. Prate not 
of religion : he heralds it. Prate not of 
eternity : he contains, encircles and illu- 
mines it. 

Who listens the babbling mass shall 
never hear himself think. If you would 
to thoroughly understand a certain phase 
of nature, put your own big heart into it, 
then bend down and listen its throbbing. 
A whole history, a biography, a drama, a 
religion, lies in one's own heart-throb if 
we will but listen and interpret it. Where 
art halts, nature begins ; where ideas halt, 
feeling takes up sovereignty ; where man 
halts, the God proceeds. Always is the 
intuitive mood an index to something 
superior. We know men and would to 
know ourselves ; but we cannot choose, 
and so are obliged to contemplate our- 
selves in others. The ego of the man 



The Poets Province 235 

lies imaged in the mass. The Persians 
believed that a pearl was a rain-drop fal- 
len from heaven into the mouth of an 
oyster, crystallized into a jewel. There 
are descending constantly into the open 
heart of man the bounties from heaven 
which crystallize into things of tangible 
beauty and power. All things embody 
pearls to the eyes of a great spirit ; and 
he is worthiest who not only sees great 
pearls in another's heart, but greater ones 
than any other man sees. Whatever is 
of the devil's master-craft walks the earth 
a doubter of the jewels at the bottom of 
every honest heart, — the God-dropped 
union in every resolute cup of life. If it 
be a false pearl, it can but proclaim it- 
self. If it be worthy, it if already self- 
proclaimed fit for the diadem of angels. 

King Arthur in the solitary glen of 
Lyonnesse discovered two brothers in 
mortal combat over a crown of gold. Both 
being slain in the unbrotherly feud, the 
sordid prize which was the cause of dif- 
ference, the king made his own. The 



236 Solitarius to his Dcemon 

poet is king. He finds all materialities, 
— all unbrotherly worldliness, creed with 
creed, sect with sect, opinion with opin- 
ion — at mortal, ignoble combat ; but they 
all sooner or later fall, while he calmly 
makes the crown his own. It is the re- 
served man, — the man whose powers, 
masterly as they are, only proclaim a 
ready power beyond them — this calm- 
minded third of the series, the withhold- 
ing, beholding man, — this is he that 
gathers to himself the surest certitudes, 
the exactest truth. Men as mere symbols 
of ideas, dollars, capacities, — as mere 
walking, fate-challenging substantives, — 
as synonymes of that which they should 
be but are not, descend to meet on equal 
footing with their co-equals. Why is it 
necessary to step down and out of the 
temple of our truer selves when hailing 
an equal over our commonplace mo- 
ments ? The gods commune with us only 
on high places ; who cannot lift himself, 
cannot lift others. Hydrogen would con- 
sume us ; nitrogen, choke us ; oxygen, 
madden ; and carbonic acid gas would 



The Poefs Province 237 

poison us if it predominated in excess. 
Together they are vitality and thought- 
resource, mind-resource; separately — 
dissolution. But some of these may be 
taken in double quantities without harm. 
Optimism thrice administered in a god's 
bounty ; of pessimism a single quantity 
is not unoften fatal. It is the abuse of 
God's licence that makes madmen. The 
abuse of republicanism means anarchy. 
The dervish — ' good easy man ' — howled 
in his high trance of ecstacy till a pillar 
of the temple fell and crushed him ; pray 
what had Allah to do with that ? 



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